Crisis of Image in Conversation: Expanding Photography
Please join artists Melissa Joseph, Sasha Rudensky, and Amy Elkins in conversation with author Kirsten Gill, co-hosted by MoCAA and Field Projects.
Sasha Rudensky’s photographic work explores the production and interpretation of cultural identity and history. Amy Elkin’s “Black is the Day, Black is the Night” is a photography project spanning from 2009-2016 that explores how long-term isolation and incarceration can affect an individual’s psychology, sense of self, and perception of reality. Melissa Joseph presents a laborious translation of an archive of family photographs into felt “snapshot” sculptures that distend the immediacy of photography. The exhibition catalog’s author Kirsten Mairead Gill is a scholar and theorist of moving image media at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation, “Movement Image: Black Freedom in Experimental Film and Video, 1965-85”, recovers a range of experiments in post-war cinema to argue that the sociality of moving image media was dramatically re-imagined in the light of Black liberation movements from the 1960s-1980s.
Together, they will discuss how image-making, and particularly photography, today have the potential to “rearrange the possibilities for how we might appear,” a critical intervention in a state with increasing censorship and repressive mandates created to push for a homogenous nationalistic image.
