Considered Interactions

Opening reception | Saturday, April 16, 2022 | 12–5 pm

John Divola
Tarah Douglas
Steve Kahn

Raymond Meeks & Adrianna Ault One considers the origin of a search as an extended view into the effort of returning to a place or idea and seeking the differences instead of dwelling in sameness. The attention provided to place suggests a challenge since distinctions vary from multiple points of control: change of environment, change of body dynamics, to what is beyond our control: light, weather, time. Even disappearance is an available risk given the dependence of a return.

This exhibition considers a generative process of image making and the visual distinctions from one moment to the next that call attention to the process of its very creation through each frame. In each of these works a series of considered interactions result in the inquiry into the real and representative, the natural and artificial and how we designate space for ourselves in the world. 

In Enso: 36 Right-Handed Circumference Gestures, John Divola signals evidence of time, place and being. Between June 7th and August 12th, 2018, Divola performed a gesture using the circumference of his right arm in the abandoned housing tract of what was previously George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. The circular marks are made in various rooms but always in the morning. Understood as a single work, each frame offers an index of a place and a time and an index and trace of physical being. 

In Untitled (no 1-15), Tarah Douglas inserts her body into the frame of natural environment as a gesture of admission, a nod to the visibility of body language and the signals and narratives it projects to the viewer. Douglas's movements are at once various and theatrical: climbing, reading, exploring, observing. The landscape and the body exist together in an orbicular way. 

Running (1976), was captured as a self portrait by Steve Kahn while shooting in a run-down apartment complex in Los Angeles between 1974-76. Kahn turned his attention to his body in motion using framing and scale to present an illusion in space and time. The cropping of each frame allows for the minute difference and the illusion of speed.

Raymond Meeks and Adrianna Ault created the photographs, titled Winter Farm Auction (2019), in response to the event itself. Each farm tool selected is thrown into the air and captured in motion, a compositional choice that provides the tool with its own life separate from that of the user. The motion of the tools captured on film pierce the frame nearly marking time.  

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