CRISIS OF IMAGE

ON VIEW: FEBRUARY 11 - MAY 14, 2023

First Floor Galleries

Featured Artists: Ayanna Dozier, Amy Elkins, Melissa Joseph, Lydia McCarthy, Triton Mobley, Steve Pauley, Sasha Rudensky, and Rob Swainston + Zorawar Sidhu

Curated by Jacob Rhodes, Kris Racaniello, and Lisa Schilling

Catalog essay by Kirsten Gill

Crisis of Image features artists who resist the call for image erasure and instead develop new strategies for the production of visuality. Rather than seeking to escape the image or even to create new images, they explore the methods, access, and means of visual creation.

Throughout history, dominant cultural structures have imposed image censorship and constraints. Our saturated visual culture has produced new calls for image suppression – but why? One answer might be that the recent abundance of image making technologies has made visual production more accessible.

In the 1970s and 80s, images were claimed and revitalized by artists whose right to produce them had been historically denied – resulting in the emergence of new feminist, BIPoC, and queer representational strategies. The call to censor or constrain the image is often produced by a scarcity anxiety that seeks to maintain a status quo. Approaches that address this legacy of dominant heteropatriarchal aesthetics are one new direction for artists seeking equity in this saturated visual world.

Crisis of Image is curated by Jacob Rhodes, Kris Racaniello, and Lisa Schilling of Field Projects.