still
March 6 – April 30, 2008

Artist Talk with Nigel Poor:
March 13, 6:30 pm

Opening Reception:
March 13, 7-9pm

Metro State Center for Visual Art presents still
featuring the photography and film of Slater Bradley, Sally Mann and Nigel Poor. The exhibition was curated by MSCD Art Department Chair Greg Watts and Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography Cinthea Fiss.

Throughout the history of photography the issue of mortality has been a very present spectre in both photographic theories and practices. Early daguerreotypes of American soldiers about to leave for the Civil War were witness to their impending death. In the late nineteenth century it was common to photograph dead babies as a way to immortalize their short lives. In the latter part of the twentieth century photography’s relationship to death expanded in the writings of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes to include the way we understand the very nature of a photograph, always a moment that has instantly past, always engaging the notion that this moment, this life, won’t last. The exhibition still considers the diverse ways in which the work of three photographers interacts with the relationship of mortality and photography.

Slater Bradley revives the traces of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, left by popular imagery. In Doppelganger Bradley uses the idea of the double spirit that has attached itself to a living person to explain how he, or his own doppelganger, has been inhabited with the ghosts of dead musicians. The effect of music on a collective psyche is pervasive, but often difficult to make visible. Here we begin to understand how alive and present the dead can be.

In the work of Sally Mann, What Remains asks the question, “What is left after death?” She has photographed the Gettysburg battlefields, locations marked by death. Looking into these landscapes one can try to see what exists after these bodies that have died here, at this site, have long ago been removed. In this series she also explores the natural process of human bodies’ decomposition in photographs of a forensic study site confronting visceral emotions of life and death.

Nigel Poor collects. Her collections are a means of saying here I am, this is me, all this accumulation is who I am. In 287 Flies and Killing Season she has recorded and archived dead insects. Just as everyday moments that quickly pass can be relegated to oblivion unless somehow captured, as with a photograph, and transformed into a specific remembered instant, the dead insects are usually banished from awareness, but here are manifest into the realm of the here and now

Admission to the Center for Visual Art is free and open to the public.

Hours: Tuesday – Friday 11am - 6pm, Saturday 12 - 5pm. Admission is free.

Upcoming Exhibitions

back to top>