Unsuspending Disbelief

Unsuspending Disbelief questions the notion of a straightforward relationship between the photograph, what it depicts, and what it "means." The exhibition's repeated images of rainbows are an analog to the values we invest in photography. Light phenomenon without inherent meaning, photographs are understood as representing what they picture. Their social, historical, political, and aesthetic codes are seemingly neutral, as their ubiquity gives rise to a veracity that is understood as resolute. Foregrounding the conventions and rhetoric of photography, the artists included in Unsuspending Disbelief undermine photography's legitimization of hegemonic forms of desire and its naturalization of the "real." Drawing on traditional categories of picture-making, from portraits of a beloved, to documentary and architectural photography, this exhibition considers strategies of recontextualization that displace the authority of the camera's gaze.

Featuring Shumon Ahmed, Matthew Connors, Gauri Gill, Paul Graham, An-My Lê, Yamini Nayar, Thasnai Sethaseree, Tejal Shah, Mickalene Thomas, and Lidwien van de Ven.