Gideon Barnett: After Edith

November 2 – December 18, 2015

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Gallery Talk: Thursday, November 19, 6pm

Reception: Thursday, November 19, 5-7pm

Gideon Barnett’s exhibition After Edith brings together a collection of images that he produced by documenting vandalized photography books found in public libraries. The project began in Miami, Florida, with the discovery of a copy of Emmet Gowin’s Photographs in which the iconic nude portraits of Gowin’s wife Edith had been defaced by prurient library visitors. Parts of the images had been cut with a razor blade and, in some instances, entirely torn out of the book. This deliberate removal of “provocative” imagery and the psychology of what may have sparked such an act fascinated Barnett, and prompted a closer look at the visual by-products—the way in which the cuts open through to another image, for example, or how the tearing of a page can create a compelling juxtaposition of photographs. The vandalized images are unquestionably elegant and beautiful when taken out of context and framed on the wall, yet all together Barnett’s photographs also point to a disconcerting fearful, destructive, or even violent intention behind them.

Some librarians would attempt to mend the most heavily vandalized books by pasting inky black-and-white photocopies of the original pages back into the books. These replacements, reminiscent of smudged charcoal drawings, were equally intriguing to Barnett, so he physically removed the sheets of paper and collected them along the way as a counterpart to the photographs he was making. In his exhibition at Light Work, Barnett shows the photocopies as unique objects, pinned by small magnets into playful forms onto pieces of chalkboard. Barnett visited libraries across South Florida and discovered a number of books that had been altered, and his collection of photographs grew to include traces of other well-known images spanning the last century of photography, from Edward Weston to Gregory Crewdson. Though the reference points within the medium of photography are certainly interesting to see, After Edith aims to consider larger cultural and political concerns of censorship and human nature. Through a thoughtful combination of photographs of vandalized book pages and original found photocopies, Barnett simultaneously recounts that so much of what a photograph signifies will be determined by what the viewer brings to the image. “I’m interested in the generative potential of this vandalism,” explains Barnett, “and how just by reframing it with a camera it can become something new, something on its own.”

lg.ht/AfterEdith

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Gideon Barnett is an artist from Jasper, Tennessee. He received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2011 where he was awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship (selected by Robert Storr). Since 2012 he has exhibited at the Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL; The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, FL,; and The Wolfsonian–FIU, Miami, FL. In 2013 he was awarded a Visual and Media Artists Fellowship from the South Florida Cultural Consortium.

gideonbarnett.com

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Special thanks to Marcia Duprat

marciaduprat.com

Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

daylightblue.com

Light Work

lightwork.org

Music: Kai Engel

Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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