Panel Discussion
Friday, October 05 - 11:00AM to 11:45AM
301 Design Building
Addressing notions of readership, storytelling, and the relationship between the visual and verbal, Diane Durant's recent body of work, Mental Pictures, combines the elements of information and representation common in a gallery setting —from framed gelatin silver contact prints and vinyl vignettes to descriptive wall labels and narrative statements—Durant works to develop new plot lines, characters, settings, and shared narrative experiences. Mental Pictures plays with both the material meaning of the photographic object as well as the viewer's expectation of what defines a photograph.
Julia Wilson's Splendid Failures examines our contemporary relationship to the photographic image. Wilson redirects the viewer's perception of the photograph by undermining the subject and highlighting the unintended and overlooked attributes of the medium – including the surface and its contextual presentation. By placing text in flattened proximity to images, this work mimics and fragments how we absorb information and our processes of communication. Ultimately, Splendid Failures fragments and re-forms systems of communication to call to light the latent ambiguity of both image and text and emphasize the importance of interpretation when receiving photographic and photo-textual information.
Dialogue and critique are important to the SPE mission.
Please join the conversation.