login   password  artist portfolio  gallery portfolio  MYabsolutearts 
absolutearts.com
 
help   |  media kit   |  about us   |  services   |  contact  
  NEWEST TRENDS                .   SEARCH   .   BUY   .   JOIN   .   COLLECT   .   RESEARCH   .   READ  .   DISCUSS  
Indepth Arts News:

"Jan Dunning: Eerie"
2004-02-14 until 2004-03-14
31 Grand
Brooklyn, NY, USA United States of America

31Grand is proud to present Eerie, photographs by Jan Dunning. In the mid-nineteenth century writings of Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice's Wonderland, he refers often to his theory of a human being's three psychic states, in which he is most fascinated by the idea of an "eerie state" of consciousness. Carroll defined this as an in between place, located after "ordinary" awareness, which is conscious only of reality, and coming before the "trance" or sleeping state, in which we dream. To be in the eerie state is to have simultaneously a logical sense of one's surroundings and a heightened awareness of the supernatural.

Jan Dunning works with pinhole photography for the similar way in which it combines the apparently opposing realms of the magical and the realistic, bridging the material and the immaterial worlds. By harnessing photography's paradoxical nature she can, as Marina Warner puts it, "seize evidence" of the fantastic, to present a magical and metaphysical take on the modern world. Subverting our expectation of photography as an objective genre, documenting without interpreting, her work recalls the days of the medium's invention and its original connotations of alchemy, witchcraft and superstition. Long exposures, infinite depth of field, the idiosyncrasies of home made cameras; these characteristics allow intuition and accident to assert their influence, and for ideas of the invisible, the unknowable, the fantastic and the unique to take precedence.

For her first solo exhibition in New York, Dunning directs disturbing pieces of theatre, conceived either in her imagination or inspired by existing narratives and played out in one exposure for the camera. The resulting work, the series Metamorphoses, depicts epic transformations, many of which are reinterpretations of Ovid's mythical tales. The photographs strive to unsettle by proffering evidence of events unseen, unfathomable or implausible. By re-enacting Leda's encounter or Helen of Troy's hatching, by turning women into birds or growing eight legs as a contemporary Arachne, the pinhole camera allows the artist or her models to mutate, reinventing themselves as impossible hybrids, clones and monsters. At times grotesque and malevolent, at others regenerative and productive, the physical according to the artist is indefinable, untrustworthy even. Images reveal and yet conceal, the familiar world is made strange and a higher value is placed on emotional experience and imaginative escape. Within her themes of multiple identities and the evolving self, Dunning suggests that the eerie pinhole perspective is the ideal mediator of modern insecurities.

IMAGE
Jan Dunning,
Arachne (from Metamorphoses),
color pinhole photograph, 2003


Related Links:


 
Jeff Ramirez : This is the life - These are the real things - Cella Gallery


Call for Artists : LIQUID CITIES - International Video Art Limousine Festival . London, April 2010 - International ArtExpo


Rita Kashap Homage to Friedrich S. - Galerie Vinogrado


Romance, Passion, Eroticism : The Art of Love to Feature Work by Walter King - Galleria Evangelia


The Thoughts Series by D. Lammie-Hanson - Big Top Art Gallery


Call for Artists : Seeking 300 Glass Pieces - Saco Msueum


EDGE OF INDONESIA - Edge Gallery


Suzi Evalenko - What Mattered Most : A Life in Art and Letters - First Street Gallery


Wayne Quilliam : Photography in Context of Indiginous Australian Culture - Art Place Berlin - The Forum for Contemporary Art and Intercultural Project at Park Inn


Tim Etchells : A Solo Exhibition - Gasworks Gallery


Alberto Giacomett i: Woman with Chariot. Triumph and Death - Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum


Street Seen : The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959 - Milwaukee Art Museum


Tino Sehgal - Guggenheim Museum


Donnie 2010 : Contest and Exhibit - Karin Kuhlmann Earns Honorable Metion - MOCA, the Museum of Computer Art


 

indepth arts search:     
 
Free Arts News Subscription | Browse the Arts | Artist Portfolios | International Arts News | Arts News Archive | Privacy Policy