Gallery
Beyond The Apparatus
May 11 - June 15, 2024
David Campany
Edward Cushenberry
Eduardo Consuegra
Don Edler
Luke Harnden
Steve Kado
Soo Kim
Jacob Murtle
Juliana Paciulli
Pacifico Silano
Before photography became a tool to fix the three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional
surface of an object, society relied on artists to depict reality. Photography relieved artists of
this duty. It can be argued that the way we view the world since the invention of photography is
through a series of images. This multiplicity of images has allowed reality to be bent to the will
of its handlers, creating multiples that lead to multiple realities. Thus, images lost our trust to
depict reality. Photography is no longer a reliable tool except to its user, and to those who
believe in the merit of that user. So maybe, the power of the image has shifted back to the
artist’s ability to use the medium of photography to depict reality.
It is the system of photography itself that is instrumental in asking the critical questions, and
these questions, rather than the material that elevates the medium. Inherent in its use,
photography has always reacted to both technology and science. Perhaps, having reached the
edge of both, photography is moving towards a place where there is no longer a normal system,
there is no order of operation, becoming a truly conceptual medium. And maybe, the material
of photography is now only another simulacrum attempting to trigger multiple levels of memory
in order to arrive at more malleable levels of engagement than the cold digital system that is
the contemporary order of the day. If we, the users of the medium, continue to explore the
ethos of photography, and its output continues to be dematerialized in digital form, where does
that take us as a society and what is it that now constitutes a photographic object?