This Synthetic Moment - Group Show

David Nolan Gallery presents This Synthetic Moment, curated by David Hartt, on view January 18 through March 10, 2018.

With: Liz Johnson Artur, James Barnor, Kwame Brathwaite, David Hartt, Zoe Leonard, Christopher Williams

A picture of one woman looking at another, a portrait of a man holding a camera, a portrait of several women in a schoolyard, a picture of a dancer recumbent, and a picture of several ships.

A crisis of borders, a fold in time, a rupture in space. An assertion of gradience.

I was having a hard time describing how I was feeling and then Thomas said "synthetic" and it stuck in my mind. I wanted something porous, a polymeric structure where the voice, agency, geography, and temporality of others collude to produce a more compelling version of the world. Brixton, Los Angeles, Accra, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, etc., spinning a new distributed off-axis center.

I was having a hard time describing what I was seeing. So I'll show you instead. Pictures of power and pride and grief and desire and confusion and community and celebration and abandonment and of a wandering itinerant solitude.

I want to hold all of these things together in this synthetic moment.

The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists who use photography almost as a will to power, an assertion of their own positionality. A compound description of the world as vast and contingent. --

David Hartt, 2017

Opening reception: Thursday, January 18, 6:00 - 8:00pm

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