Amanda Ross-Ho
Visual Arts Center, Austin
Through March 12

By Justin Cavin

Amanda Ross-Ho, Installation view from UNTITLED NOTHING FACTORY at the Visual Arts Center in the Department of Art and Art History at UT Austin, Spring 2011. Photo by Adam Schreiber & Colin Doyle.

Amanda Ross-Ho lends form to the aesthetic impulse by recontextualizing the perceived formal and physical limits of the gallery, exhibition hall, and artist’s studio. In a sort of narratological loop the relationship between exhibition and viewer is called into question by way of installations that are intended to upend the traditionally understood roles of space, the viewer, and the artist and her studio.

UNTITLED NOTHING FACTORY, her installation/performance at the Visual Arts Center, University of Texas, Austin, is no exception. In the expansive Vaulted Gallery Ross-Ho recently led a marathon art-making session. For a little over two weeks she was present in the space, serving as an artist-teacher, inviting viewers into a staging area or “factory” where they were led in producing hand-built ceramic vessels, handmade paper and blank stretched canvases at work stations. These commonly understood artistic forms (the canvas, the vessel, the paper) act as conceptual reliquaries. Through the process of their creation in this gallery-cum-studio, the objects are very much about bringing the solitary, generative activity that traditionally surrounds artists in their studios into a more egalitarian light. The objects produced by the workers are all white and seemingly anonymous in their materiality, and belie the individuals’ labor that produced them. On another collective level, many of the materials that were used to create the objects were culled from other spaces throughout the institution. The pulp of the hand-made paper, for instance, was itself made from recycled office papers.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, Ross-Ho has not only cultivated the potential energy of the space, but has also cultivated the labor and productive power of her “workers” or “participants” vis-à-vis the factory. And at the end of the day “the factory” is a rather charged situation in itself, a word that can conjure images that aren’t nearly as generous as this project intends to be. Moreover, the entire process was documented with a single time-lapse camera positioned above the gallery space that surveyed the whole scene in several-second intervals. The focal point of the installation relies heavily on the performative quality of participation. After the production stopped, and in a highly stylized fashion, the ceramic vessels were displayed on shelves, the canvases dramatically hung on one of the gallery walls, and the paper stacked neatly on tables that were used as production stations. The resulting installation is moving and ghostly.

Ultimately Ross-Ho is interested in multiplicity and the unforeseen forces that collide at any given moment to make up our present. However, there is a great deal of choreography in the VAC work. The closed-circuit recording of the entire event will presumably be displayed if the piece is reinstalled in a commercial or institutional space. Shooting at intervals of several seconds at a time the footage is likely to resemble surveillance video, a documentation process that is at odds with the fleeting intimacy encouraged throughout the project. At the end of the exhibition’s run the entire production will be packed up and shipped back to Ross-Ho’s studio in Los Angeles, where presumably it will become part of her working arsenal (if not sold). In many of her works the artist borrows elements from previous installations and incorporates them into new pieces, extending the narrative further while continuing to fold the past onto the present.

Justin Cavin is a writer and curatorial assistant at the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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Lisa Tan
Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin
Through March 27

By Lee Webster

Lisa Tan, Exhibition view of Two Birds, Eighty Mountains, and a Portrait of the Artist, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Lisa Tan’s Two Birds, Eighty Mountains, and a Portrait of the Artist finds meaning in the impulse to tally and poetry in the compulsion to chronicle. The works rely on Tan’s rigorous process of accumulating information and take the form of a collection, a long correspondence, an obsessive routine and a minute alteration. In the starkly arranged gallery the four pieces are in quiet dialogue about intimacy, loss and the passage of time. However, what they have to say is so subtle, their whisperings so quiet, that their message is sometimes lost to the viewer.

The show’s installation is ringed by the piece Letters from Dr. Bamberger, installed along the gallery walls. This series of letters chronicles the results of Tan’s annual physicals over the course of ten years, in cordial yet clinical notes from her physician. Blood sugar levels, good and bad cholesterol, kidney, liver and thyroid functions: all are accounted for by Dr. Bamberger. On September 18, 2007 he writes, “I have reviewed your lab tests. Everything looks good. Actually the results are almost identical to the ones from 2006.” In fact, the results are almost identical every year. At each visit Dr. Bamberger recommends calming exercise for Tan’s stress-related maladies; each year they abate, but never disappear. Next to each letter to Tan is an accompanying letter to a man. We assume these to be romantic partners, first Charles, then Kurt, then Jonas. For a couple of years only a blank sheet of letterhead accompanies Tan’s note. Letters to Dr. Bamberger is succinct and powerful. The redundancy of the results in the face of the passage of time and the shifting of personal relationships is striking. It is a portrait of a woman, less of her vital signs and more of her psychological disposition to ruminate, collect, and perhaps over-worry.

Tan’s latest project delves into an epistolary exchange, this time between French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and his lover Madame Forget. The Madame’s name becomes a poetic symbol in the study of a romance that passed a couple centuries before us. Tan has created prints of these historic letters, placed in a vitrine in the center of the first room. They are gorgeous antique missives, ornate and clearly written with attention and care, though their contents remain impenetrable to most viewers, as they are not only written in a faded and lilting cursive, but in French.

National Geographic (2009) catalogues a different archive. Shown on side-by-side slide projectors are eighty slides of mountains clipped from the pages of National Geographic, along with images of the magazine clipping’s verso. Without the aid of the exhibition brochure card we might not understand what we are seeing, let alone the personal significance of these clippings. Cut from Tan’s father’s National Geographic collection, these mountains and their reverse pages are a rumination on the actual, physical mountain that separated Tan from her father during the years before his death.

Tan’s video installation, Les Samouraïs (2010) explores solitude and loss, as well as the possibilities of revisionist history. A short video loop of the opening credits of Jean-Pierre Melville’s French New Wave film Le Samouraï is projected onto a small screen. Melville’s film focuses primarily on a solitary man alone in a room, kept company by a single solitary songbird in a cage. During the filming of Le Samouraï the bird perished in a fire in Melville’s studio. Tan’s piece is a subtle revision of the opening sequence: she has added a second yellow bird to the cage. On a projection so small this fact could easily go unnoticed.

The pieces in Tan’s exhibition speak in a low murmur amongst themselves of minor incidents of great personal significance to the artist that remain mostly opaque to the viewer. Tan fuses narrative with a rigorous conceptual practice to an uneven effect. Works like Letters from Dr. Bamberger and National Geographic succeed with a simple conceptual foundation that serves as a platform for a delicately conveyed story. Other pieces have an impact when decoded by the exhibition card, but lack an oomph standing alone in the gallery. Two Birds, Eighty Mountains, and a Portrait of the Artist has its share of moments that fall flat, but when Tan achieves that magic balance of concept, content and form, the effects resonate hauntingly.

Lee Webster is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas.

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Michelle Handelman
Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin
Through March 27

By Claire Ruud

Michelle Handelman, Dorian, a cinematic perfume, 2009, Digital video projection, 63 mins. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Laure Leber.

Michelle Handelman’s Dorian, a cinematic perfume (2009), a sumptuous four-channel video re-presenting Oscar Wilde’s classic through the bodies of young, scenester drag artists and dykes, carried me to Arthouse directly after I touched down in Austin last weekend. I was completely taken with the work. I also found it irritatingly self-indulgent. Yet at every turn, Dorian embraced its own self-indulgence with a wink and a nod that made the work all the more irresistible. Its affected extravagance gave me permission to revel in my own. Riveted by the unbelievable wigs (Handelman’s craft is everywhere apparent in the costumes and sets she designed), languid naked bodies, a butt plug to die for—excuse the pun—I allowed myself to be seduced.

Of course, Wilde’s themes* reappear in Handelman’s video. Youth and beauty take on death (and lose). Art and artifice commingle, threatening art’s purity. Surface veils meaning, or perhaps masks emptiness. The portrait is the real, and the real is a portrait. This last motif comes through strongly and fits our moment perfectly. In a post-Butler world, many of us are self-consciously performing our identities. Every day, we draw our own portraits through our bodies. This act throws traditional portraiture into a tizzy.

How to draw a portrait of a portrait? Handelman’s Dorian is just such an ironic drag performance of portraiture. With a nod to its legacy, her camera often lingers on her sitter’s faces in stunningly simple close-ups. Looking into the lens, and by proxy into the spectator’s eyes, they create moments of felt connection for the viewer. But where is the person behind those eyes? The video creates a stylized portrait of performers who are stylized portraits.

Dorian plays into our confusion between the artist and her performance. Wilde and his Dorian Gray are the perfect foil for this plot. The book appears to have fed into suspicions about Wilde’s sexuality; in his well-known prologue he retorts: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” The danger of the book was the possibility that it revealed the artist’s true nature, and by extension the nature of his associates. In Handelman’s work, the artist’s version of the prologue shows up mid-story in the form of a cherub-faced androgyne yelling at the camera. You’re sitting there judging us, she screams. But you want us, want to be us, too—this is the underlying current of her monologue.

Handelman presents a queer world that might be difficult for a public to swallow. (Recent scandal over Wojnarowicz suggests avant-garde shock and censorship are not a thing of the past.) Dorian’s affected aesthetic works to cloak its queerness in frivolity. Like Wilde’s plea of uselessness—“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely”—Handelman’s affectation protects the work from criticism. However, Handelman could be screwed either way; there is always an argument against her. If Dorian has meaning and substance, it is dangerous. If it is all surface and self-consciousness, it is decadent. The potency of Handelman’s work, like Wilde’s in his day, is its ability to elude fixity in either category. Pick your fancy, and then fret over the possibility you might be wrong. To rework Wilde, decadence is both a mannerism of style an activist tactic.

*For those who need the Cliffs Notes summary of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian is a gentleman of unconscionable beauty, admired by the painter Basil Hallward and mentored, in a manner of speaking, by Lord Henry Wotton. After receiving a book from Lord Henry about “a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own,” Dorian falls into a life of the senses—riddled with narcotic and amorous adventures. In a kind of pact with the devil, Dorian achieves perpetual youthfulness and beauty by transferring the process of aging onto a portrait of himself painted by Basil. In the end, however, Dorian becomes the victim of his own sensuality, and, having killed his companion Basil, he plunges the same knife into the now grisly portrait, an act that kills the man and frees the portrait from the spell. Dorian’s servants find him dead, a gnarled old man with a knife in his heart, and the portrait lies next to him youthful as ever.

Claire Ruud is the former Associate Director of Fluent~Collaborative. She obtained her M.A. in art history at The University of Texas at Austin and is currently an M.B.A. candidate at the Yale School of Management.

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Kings of the F**king Sea by Dan Boehl
Published by: Birds, LLC
Released: January 30, 2011

By Katie Geha

Cover image, Kings of the F**king Sea by Dan Boehl. Image by Jonathan Marshall.

Dan Boehl’s first book of poems, Kings of the F**king Sea, feels like a first book of poems. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Ted Berrigan’s first release, The Sonnets, remains one of my favorite books of all time. Many claim that Wallace Stevens' Harmonium is his best book, and it too was his first. I mention this only to point to certain qualities that I relate to the “first book”—a sense of experimentation, a discovery of one’s style, veiled autobiography, the passage from “poet” to “published poet.” It’s not unlike the awkward thrill of losing one’s virginity. Suddenly, you’re part of the club.

Being part of the club also means being in dialogue with any number of poets and literary movements. In Boehl’s epic, he borrows the tropes of a classic adventure story—pirates at war on a rollicking sea—to relay the tale of a 30 year-old man reconciling the world and his place in it. In the first section of the story the main character faces a crisis of conviction as he navigates the pains of authenticity that white male Americans in their thirties often deal with:

I am leaving because they are filling
me with baseball, with Tom Cruise,
with hamburgers and water
bottled in Atlanta. They drive Mercedes.
They daycare their kids. They rake their lawns
and retire. How could I ever
be one of them?

The character gears up for war on the sea because “…We need/to be shaped by our adventures,/ our failures, and after/ the world is finished with us/ get stranded in our lives.” In the remaining two sections, Boehl plays with the poetic form through various battles and then, as in the Odyssey, the protagonist returns home.

The story is accompanied by a small selection of images by artist Jonathan Marshall, which makes sense since Marshall’s work also often circulates around the creation of a fictional adventure story. Although I love the idea of mixing the visual with the poetic, in this case the images become too illustrative. Rather than letting the poems be open to a variety of meanings, these pictures mire the story in a particular time and place—Austin stoner drawing, pixilated and crystallized tribal motifs, both digital and analog.

It is this sense of hermeticism, a tightly wound story that constantly refers to itself, that detracts from the real impact of the book. Yet while at first it may seem as if Boehl is just spinning a tale of hipster youth at sea, deeper into the poems a real sense of the hysteria and confusion of war emerges. Boehl’s ability to overlay the past, the present, and the mythic, as in the beautiful poem “When in Rome,” creates an elegiac and deeply troubling portrait of our post-9/11 world.

The poems are most thrilling when ambition and bravado are abandoned. It is the quiet moments, the description of a cave as a “black eye wincing” or a mare placing her head in the palm of the narrator’s hand, where the real artistry of language emerges. And when the poems work their best, like in this excerpt from “Poolside,” the main character’s coming-of-age begins to feel like our collective coming-of-age:

We’ve chosen this moment
to carry us to bed
hearts attended
friends destitute of love
gazing on the same dark pool
my face mirrored in your face.
Don’t tell me
you can smell the water
or the future.
The pool isn’t a sea
but sometimes it feels like it.

The book doesn’t work when it sheds its vulnerability and becomes too admiring of its own creation. It feels superfluous to name the characters in the poems after famous artists and poets. This means very little unless you know who these people are, and even then it just seems like an in-joke. Why are the titles in the second section of the book in both French and English? Why isn’t “fucking” spelled out in the title? This is when borrowing, referencing and taking from another language or culture doesn’t work. Sure, it’s postmodern, but it’s also gratuitous.

It is this lack of thoughtful editing that makes me believe that Boehl was afraid his first book might also be his last. This too is a quality of the “first book”—you’ve got something to prove. Dan Boehl has proven in Kings of the F**king Sea that he can write a great poem. The great book, perhaps, will be his next one.

Kings of the F**king Sea is available for purchase at Domy Books, Art Palace Gallery and online.

Katie Geha is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Ian Hamilton Finlay
Marfa Book Company
Closed January 23, 2010

By Erin Kimmel

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 2010. Photo by Aurora Tang. Courtesy of the artist, Marfa Book Company, and Wild Hawthorn Press.

The interpretive labor demanded by the printed work of Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay can be dizzying—like the mind’s eye on a semantic tilt-a-whirl. A large part of this dizziness stems from the seeming straightforwardness of his visual language and syntactic brevity. Both of these qualities characterize the sundials and tombstones he spread throughout the sprawling garden, Little Sparta, for which he is most widely remembered today. Less well known are his printed ephemera explored in the book The Present Order: The Printed Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay. These works are notable for a number of recurring visual and literary references: a penchant for classical writers, a concern with fishing and the sea, an interest in the French Revolution, and a continual revisiting of World War II. However, if modernity is a rupture between words and things, signs and sounds, Finlay’s aesthetic constitution demands their repair in complex and provoking paper riddles. His use of a cross-generic mode of concrete poetry as conceptual gesture demonstrates the impossibility of a simple resemblance between signifier and signified. Instead, Finlay’s formal clarity and enigmatic result evokes the distance between the two, and the effort required to overcome it.

The Present Order is a poetic exploration of Finlay’s printed oeuvre in both form and content; as such, it is at once a homage and key to the message encrypted in Finlay’s many printed events. The book was published in tandem with the exhibition Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Selection of Printed Works, organized by the book’s publishers Tim Johnson and Caitlin Murray at the Marfa Book Co. Gallery. The more than seventy works exhibited ranged from booklets to prints to folding cards. Sixteen of the more than seventy works in the show are reproduced on the first 16 pages of The Present Order. They are followed by seven pieces of writing by academics, relatives and collectors of Finlay. Johnson, a poet and owner of the Marfa Book Co., has long had an interest in Finlay’s incendiary practice. Murray, an archivist at the Judd Foundation and a graduate student in art history at the University of Texas at Austin, has long had an interest in difficult-to-display artist books. Together Johnson and Murray selected the abundance of Finlay’s small, paper works for their “mobility, materiality and forms of contingency.”

A large part of Finlay’s dedication to contingency relies on the generative syntax of material: paper, ink, gutters, stitches, folds and wrappers. As Finlay’s grandson, Alec Finlay, states in the essay W-I-L-D-H-A-W-T-H-O-R-N, within book form and bound pages “everything belongs and has potential.” For this reason, and in keeping with Finlay’s collaborative practice, Johnson and Murray always knew that they would work with their friend, one-time Marfa resident and publisher of Veneer magazine Aaron Flint Jamison. Cubic zirconium, spray foam and sound modules are only a few of the unexpected materials Jamison somehow works into Veneer’s traditional magazine skeleton. For the front and back cover of The Present Order, Jamison chose a digital camouflage print—speaking to Finlay’s interest in the conflation of the militaristic and pastoral.

Camouflage works by disrupting an outline, and thereby confusing an observer as to its nature—a fitting metaphor for Finlay’s abhorrence of the gestalt. Although identifiable on first glance, the concrete constellations are not penetrable on first sight. Using an enigmatic but elegant combination of image and text, he confuses an observer as to the nature of the signified and demands that they perform a mental pixilation of his ephemera. As the French scholar Anne Moeglin-Delcroix explains in “Poet or Artist?”, the second piece in The Present Order, Finlay requires a reader who is “patient and sometimes stubborn, one who has a desire to understand.” Herein lies the controversy that surrounds much of Finlay’s work. Many have interpreted his recycling of the imagery of modern warfare, the French Revolution or the Third Reich, as an apology for it. This could not be farther from Finlay’s anti-gestalt sentiment.

What Finlay’s use of classical, militaristic and fascist imagery refuses to overlook is the complacencies of democracy, the questions that our culture does not dare to address. He urges us to “recognize or come to terms with history’s continuity of the present, and the grim paradoxes, which honest representations of that continuity reveal.” It is against this background that one understands Finlay’s preoccupation with both Robespierre and Saint-Just and finds for him a contemporary brother in arms in the cultural theory superstar Slavoj Žižek. For both Finlay and Žižek, Robespierre champions the excess in which virtue and terror coincide—barring us from blind allegiance to the status quo. In an introduction to the writings of Robespierre, Žižek writes, “While democracy admits antagonistic struggle as its goal, its procedure is regulated-systemic.” In Finlay’s tank, Luftwaffe aircraft, guillotine and military insignia, he attempts to unveil the paradox of the regulated-systematic that is inscribed in our social body. The Present Order too, though hermeneutically sealed in camouflage, urges us to examine the contingency of virtue and terror in the layers and layers of meaning in Finlay’s work.

The Present Order: Writings on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay is printed and bound in Canada by Westcan Printing Group. It is available for purchase at Marfa Book Company, Domy Books in Austin, Dexter Sinister in New York and online via Veneer Magazine.

Erin Kimmel is a writer and curator living in Marfa, Texas.

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Drawn from Photography
Drawing Center, New York
Through March 31

By Rachel Cook

Andrea Bowers, Non Violent Protest Training, Abalone Alliance Camp, Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, and San Louis Obispo County Telegraph-Tribune, September 14, 1981 (detail), 2004, Graphite pencil on paper, 38 x 49 3/4 inches. Photo by Hermann Feldhaus. Whitney Museum of American Art, New NY, Gift of Steven Golding Perelman.

Whether it’s activism or social engaged artwork, contemporary artists and their presenters have responded to the political climate with a sense of both urgency and agency. Agency in the traditional sense doesn’t appear to be a thread in the works by the thirteen artists within the exhibition Drawn from Photography at the Drawing Center. Rather, the works are brought together by a relationship to a particular type of photography. Appropriated images from documentary and journalistic sources, either from the front page of newspapers or from historical archives, become curator Claire Gilman’s focus. Although the title of the exhibition implies a larger swathe of drawings appropriated, gathered, and sourced from photographs, in fact it is the meticulous translation that Gilman appears most interested in highlighting.

The recirculation of political images takes center stage in Christian Tomaszewski’s boldly colored installation Hunting for Pheasants (2007-08), highlighting images from Polish hand-drawn posters from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and in Emily Prince’s ongoing portrait project chronicling American servicemen and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Historical documents and headshots from newspapers become source material for Fernando Bryce and Mary Temple’s works, in which political figures are drawn with a fluid gestural hand with a text “caption.” Sam Durant, Andrea Bowers, D-L Alvarez and Frank Selby each reinvigorate images from the past by focusing on capturing detailed marks of their appropriated images. Most of the titles reveal detailed information about the source material, from the Civil Rights demonstrations to women participating in non-violent protests. An attempt to define our contemporary moment by looking back to other events or people becomes part of these artists’ intention.

The basic tools of the trade are essential to the work of Paul Sietsema, who creates pen-and-ink drawings, and Ewan Gibbs and Richard Forster, who work primarily in graphite. Each teeter on a meticulously rendered line between the mundane and a more nuanced personal narrative. Both Gibbs and Forster concentrate on significant architectural structures, but choose viewpoints more like those found in the vein of a personal snapshot than those in historical documents. Sietsema re-appropriates his portrait by redrawing a photo of himself found by means of a Google search, reconstructing intentionality through the labor and time spent with his hands. Gilman’s essay hones in on this process.

The form of history through images, and the seemingly futile gesture of laboriously rendering it, are subjects in Gilman’s catalogue essay, which also appears redrawn as a work within the exhibition. The Turkish artist Serkan Özkaya depicts it in a shaky hand, implicating the imperfections of the human translation. Özkaya’s artistic practice has a history of being interested in the interplay between the original and the copy in an ever more mass-produced world. New York Times critic Randy Kennedy highlighted Özkaya’s work on the front cover of the Weekend Arts Edition on December 15, 2006, where the article’s lead image was a drawing by Özkaya of the paper you were holding. Within the image was another image of the same paper you were holding, continuing a repetitive image that gets infinitely smaller and smaller. Gilman’s essay functions as a marriage of form and content in Özkaya’s work, where reading the word “rendering” or the phrase “meticulous translation through drawing of images” implies something more significant.

Los Angeles-based artist Karl Haendel is represented in the exhibition through a single work, Untitled (Birthday Drawing), even though his process and the drawing’s back story tie Gilman’s essay together from the introductory paragraph to the conclusion. Haendel is typically known for his large-scale, accurately rendered works in graphite of images appropriated from popular culture and art history survey books. Untitled (Birthday Drawing) is from a newspaper published on July, 1st, 1976, and marks not only Haendel’s date of birth, but also a significant shift in the artist’s thinking about personal narrative and a conceptual use of political imagery. The socialist newspaper that is the subject of the drawing symbolizes his nostalgia for the dream of failed socialism. Though Haendel claims he was born too late, an ubiquitous complaint of most Americans born in the late ‘70s, he realized he could align the “spirit of activism and revolt” by using it symbolically with the labor of studio practice.

In the end Gilman’s case for agency through labor runs thin. Seeking to connect the artists in Drawn from Photography based on a traditional studio practice where work is being made on a daily basis, Gilman states: “At a time of global uncertainty, when it is unclear what to do or how to respond, this kind of slowed-down, labor-intensive rendering confirms that action is still possible.” Sure action is still possible, but is drawing in your studio every day enough action to warrant the term “agency”? Furthermore, is that really what all the artists in the exhibition are trying to accomplish with their work? Isn’t the idea of history and how historical narratives are composed more in play?

Trying not to end with the ubiquitous rhetorical questions, I turn to the term “agency” and the photograph. On the one hand the exhibition reinstates the importance of individual labor as part of the contemporary artist’s studio practice, whereas the post-production model of the conceptual artist would beg to differ. However, Gilman presents the appropriated image, use of the archive, and action (whether it is political or not) under the rubric of a “peculiarly conservative procedure: the meticulous translation through drawing” of photographic images. It is unclear why this labor, seen as conservative—which I would argue is more fundamental than anything else—is important to highlight now, or whether the act of translating images in both the archive and personal history is truly inherently political. In the end the exhibition leaves you with more images to process and consider re-circulating. As photography theorist Ariella Azoulay puts it bluntly when considering the photograph in a human rights discourse: “The image is partial, obscured, fissured, and questionable.”

A native of Houston, Texas, Rachel Cook is currently pursuing a Master's candidate at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

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