ALLUSIVE MOMENTS

Allusive Moments seeks to look at deferred or implicit narratives in certain aspects of contemporary film and photography. Focusing in particular on works in which the subject matter can be seen as a symbol or conduit for broader issues and narratives, the show will look at artists who raise complex issues or allude to untold stories through ostensibly simple images.

In most cases these works are achieved less through contrived compositions than through observed moments or subjects used as devices to allude to bigger issues, for example Juergen Teller’s poignant photographs from the Nuremberg series which include images of weeds and flowers growing out of abstracted concrete sections of the Nuremberg rally grounds, Henry Wessel’s photographs of contemplative men whose thoughts we can only guess at, and Ari Marcopoulos’s image of exposed tree roots which acquires new significance through the digital date stamp on its edge: 9/11/2006.

Occasionally the works verge on the allegorical or symbolic, such as Miguel Angel Ríos’s DVD projection Amor (production still pictured above) in which two spinning tops evoke the doomed lovers in Alfredo Catalani’s opera La Wally, but equally allude to larger, invisible forces at work—here literally gravity and centripetal force, but more broadly those forces which often interrupt or redirect our lives and which are beyond our control. Or Andrew Moore’s photograph Undelivered Lenin in which a Socialist Realist statue of Lenin sits amidst a forest of overgrown trees and splintered granite statuary, which can be seen as an allegory for the fall of the Soviet Union and the failure of the Communist experiment.

ALLUSIVE MOMENTS

mit Miriam Backstrom, Marion Brenner, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Candida Höfer, Laura Letinsky, Esko Männikkö, Ari Marcopoulos, Andrew Moore, Miguel Angel Rios, Kirstyn Russell, Jürgen Teller, Henry Wessel