- Christopher Gianunzio
Opening Reception, Saturday, April 4, 1pm - 4pm
Limited free seating is available on a roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the April 4th opening. Reservations are required and can be made on this by calling +1 845-758-7598 or emailing Mary Rozell at mrozell@bard.edu.
Artist/Participant Names: Sara Cwynar, Arthur Jafa, Mike Kelley, Carmen Winant
How do artists contend with the suffocating image worlds America produces? Part of Being Alive presents works by US-based artists Sara Cwynar, Mike Kelley, Arthur Jafa, and Carmen Winant, each of whose work engages vastly diverse—though all decisively American—photographic sources to elaborate on the ways in which photography constitutes our life worlds.
Kelley’s unfinished series Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000–11) collects images from late 20th-century yearbooks and, through a dual process of elaborate restaging and documentation, creates a work that is wholly new, metabolizing the original image into the visual imaginary Kelley sought to build through memory and its falsehood.
Selected from a series of 200 binders that Jafa made, Untitled notebook. 1990–2007 (1990–2007) uses the form of the page spread to build a free-associative visual collection in which commercial photography, the filmic image, and fine art depicts Black culture: simultaneously valorized and frozen into the confines of racialized subjectivity.
Cwynar’s photographs repurpose the language of advertising imagery to overwhelming effect. They deliberately confuse scale to consider the operations of the commercial photography studio, as well as the screens through which its images are projected and encountered.
A self-described photographer who does not author her own pictures, Winant developed her series of mobiles using photographs from instructional books about how to make mobiles. The form of the mobile itself resists a fixed state—its component images and parts always in balanced motion. A recurring motif in Winant’s process is imagery that teaches us how to live, which by its nature is instructional.
The sculptures, collages, notebooks, and framed photographic works in Part of Being Alive reveal the intimate, social, and often complex ways in which photography animates our understandings of ourselves amid an image-bound world.
