David Hartt

Stray Light, a body of work that includes a video, photographs, and an installation, focuses on the 1971 Johnson Publishing Company headquarters building in Chicago, designed by architect John Moutoussamy and interior designer Arthur Elrod in the company’s heyday as publisher of magazines such as Ebony and Jet. Elrod’s luxurious interior décor, accompanied by the Johnsons’ collection of African American and African art, was intended to express a black, modernist aesthetic that reinforced the ideology of the corporation and its publications. The video (shot shortly before the building was sold) is composed of a series of long, static shots. An employee quietly works away, a curtain flutters in the air- conditioned breeze, a clock hand ticks, and at times nothing happens at all. The sound track, composed by avant-garde jazz flutist Nicole Mitchell, provides a sense of narrative progression and pacing to these otherwise silent scenes. Hartt’s camera captures the new technology— Apple computers, industrial printers, network servers—occupying these otherwise unchanged spaces and ends with glimpses of the company’s archives, suggesting its historical legacy. As Hartt has stated, “I’m interested in the space between failure and success, as these individually are written on the space. It’s not one or the other; it’s a relationship.”