America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Over the past fifteen years, a revolution in digital technologies has fundamentally transformed the way we make and consume images. As with the proliferation of the printing press, camera, and television in earlier centuries, today the spread of the Internet, smartphones, and desktop printers has made it faster and easier to create and share pictures than ever before. Despite these changes, as the works on view here suggest, we live in a transitional age, navigating between screens and books, printed photographs and JPEGs, technologies on the brink of obsolescence and on the rise.

Wade Guyton and Cory Arcangel seize directly on digital technologies like inkjet printing or outdated video games but purposefully misuse them to new aesthetic ends. Kelley Walker scrambles past and present by funneling scans of old Volkswagen advertisements through high-tech modeling software before screenprinting them by hand. This interest in images as artifacts extends to R. H. Quaytman’s restaging of Edward Hopper’s iconic 1961 painting A Woman in the Sun and Christopher Williams’s clinical documentation of a remnant of printed wallpaper by the artist Daniel Buren. These works heighten both the allure and distance of past movements and styles, as does Carol Bove’s carefully curated library of sexual, political, and artistic tracts. Throughout the chapter, images flicker lightly across surfaces or burrow deep within them, come sharply into focus or all but disappear. An atmosphere of quiet contemplation—melancholy, even—reminds us that with each technological or aesthetic advance something is lost or fades away.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.