The Anxiety of Photography

In a unique collaboration between Austin’s visual arts organizations, Arthouse at the Jones Center and theAustin Museum of Art (AMOA) are pleased to announce the presentation of the group exhibition The Anxiety of Photography. The exhibition, organized by the Aspen Art Museum, will be on display in Austin from September 10 through December 30, 2011 at Arthouse at the Jones Center. A variety of public programs, including guest lectures and gallery talks, will engage the community in a dialogue on contemporary photography and its influence on the cultural landscape.

Photography can be thought of as a medium, a tool, an object, a practice, or, more often than not, some combination thereof. The fluidity of photography as a medium can produce fundamental anxieties for both artist and viewer. Through approximately 40 works—some created specifically for the exhibition, and others shown for the first time—The Anxiety of Photographyexamines the artistic output of 18 artists who embrace the medium’s plasticity and its ability to exist (sometimes uneasily) in multiple contexts.

“By playing with the photograph’s three essential qualities—being flat, static, and bounded—artists are investigating just what a photographic object and a photographic practice can be,” Aspen Art Museum Associate Curator Matthew Thompson said. “They use the confusion that photographs can produce to create a more careful state of looking, a more open dive into pictures.”

The Anxiety of Photography includes work by Colby Bird, Miriam Böhm, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Brendan Fowler, Mario Garcia Torres, Leslie Hewitt, Matt Keegan, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Anthony Pearson, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Matt Saunders, David Benjamin Sherry, Erin Shirreff, Dirk Stewen, Sara VanDerBeek, and Mark Wyse.

Many of the works in The Anxiety of Photography reflect on the changing nature of our relationship to the materiality of images, as artists produce photographic prints from hand-painted negatives, violently collide framed pictures, arrange photographs and objects in uncanny still lives, or otherwise destabilize the photographic object. Many of the artists included in The Anxiety of Photography—some of whom self-identify as photographers, others for whom photography is central to their work—employ an expanded collage aesthetic and have fully digested notions of appropriation.

An extensively illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with newly commissioned contributions by Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Jenelle Porter, senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Matthew Thompson of the Aspen Art Museum.