2018immanencemagali avezouphmuseumphotographic museum of humanityMATTHEW SWARTS Matthew Swarts + IMMANENCE by Magali Avezou @ The Photographic Museum of Humanity screen shot 2018 03 20 at 7 45 46 pm

MATTHEW SWARTS Matthew Swarts + IMMANENCE by Magali Avezou @ The Photographic Museum of Humanity

I am honored to have work from The Alternatives included in this beautiful new international online exhibition by Magali Avezou at the Photographic Museum of Humanity. https://phmuseum.com/exhibition/immanence

 

“What we say being an image, a semblance, is what without being really non-existent, doesn’t exist nevertheless.” Clément Rosset.

An image as a screen, a mirror, an illusion. A photograph as a surface, a superficies, a jumble of data pretending to reveal something.

The contemporary omnipresence of images has transformed the way we communicate. Photographs are ubiquitous, constantly circulating and transferring some kind of information. Which ones exactly, I am not sure we know.

Indeed, photography has been the modernist tool of excellence for an age that believed in science, objectivity and rationality. In post-modernity or the post-truth era, can photography still be a medium able to reflect upon our time? To translate what so often is withdrawn from our sight, hidden, concealed from public knowledge? To communicate the sensorial, the intangibility of feelings, the ambivalence of perception?

This exhibition proposes a look at artists using photography to reflect upon the ambiguity of vision. In their research, they twist the representative nature of the image to explore what is not visible. They look at themes such as the complication of communicating, the fleeting affects, the fragmentation of experiences, political secrets, prostitution, the relationship to our inner body, visual love, and social conventions.

The idea of surface is central to this selection: surface of the photograph, of the visible, of the viewable; surface that separates the outside from the inside, the public sphere from the private one; surface that conceals and creates meaning through interferences. Surface as a point of contact where things might happen.

Surface like a skin, the deepest thing in men, as Paul Valery would say.

MATTHEW SWARTS Matthew Swarts + IMMANENCE by Magali Avezou @ The Photographic Museum of HumanityMATTHEW SWARTS Matthew Swarts + IMMANENCE by Magali Avezou @ The Photographic Museum of Humanity