Reque ProQue

Matthew Girson
Julie Weber

4.6 - 5.5

Please join us for an opening reception:

Friday April 6th  7pm-10pm

Reque Proque - Assaf Evron

On the surface the works in the exhibition, Reque Proque, are looking at presentation devices and their conditions of possibilities. Julie Weber photographs lighting aparati under which products are being displayed. Matthew Girson paints architectural set ups for the presentation of art, a commodity in itself.  Although they are working along parallel lines, both artists set up trajectories that take us back and forth between photography and painting and to a conversation about the artistic gesture in the digital age. 

Throughout the history of photography, photography and painting  have been in an active dialog that constitutes each one of the mediums by its “other.” Many times this dialog is referred to as a competition; painting wants to be photography and photography tries to be painting. The works in this exhibition transcend the binarity of the competition and suggest a dialectic compromise - a hybrid mode of making that collapses the conventions of representation. 

Girson’s paintings are based on photographs he regularly takes of exhibitions of interbellum German artists. He is looking at this artwork as it is presented to an audience – as surviving remnants of a historical trauma. These photographs are source material for a set of manipulations by the artist – doubling, mirroring and solarization - all of which are taken from the photographic arsenal of the surrealists. Through digital filters, Girson deconstructs the image to its primary particles - enabling him to extract shapes based on the contrasts and tonal fields that compose it. The complex and detailed outlines in his paintings are laser-cut out of sheets of Mylar, which serve as a hard edge template to lay thick layers of paint over and over. The multi-layered surface of the painting conceals more than it reveals and presents the painting as a surface. Instead of allowing us to look through, it reflects back at us with layers of shiny silver paint. 

The Solarization effect – the aesthetic gesture that is produced digitally by Girson- was discovered by artist Lee Miller. It was an accident in which a light was turned on in the dark room while a print was being developed. The strong light flipped contrasts within the image; dark parts became white and vise versa. This accidental discovery became another word in the photographic dictionary of the surrealists, a process based gesture that challenged the representational nature of photography. 

The light of the darkroom is where Julie Weber’s images are produced. Julie’s photographs are contact prints made by laying digitally printed sheets of mylar on top of a light sensitive paper that is exposed to light. This is a hybrid mode of making which moves back and forth from the digital to the analog. Weber photographs retail displays of light-sources; bulbs, panels, LEDs, and fluorescent tubes, which float in a black background. She then carefully cuts and arranges these images into formal compositions. It is a meta consideration of the very medium of photography as light becomes Weber’s subject as well as her material.  Weber’s lamps are not employed in the set up of ‘proper’ lighting for  a photographic subject but are themselves subjected to the formal (one might say painterly) concerns of balance, contrast, and composition. 

The complex cross-mediumal approach of both artists proposes a “counter rational” mode of making. Each of the artists appropriates aesthetic strategies that flip between the analog and the digital; photography and painting a set of transformations that use the photograph not as an image but as a material or substrate for manipulation.