AFTERLIFE

Kim Schoen, photography
Bradney Evans, video
Ginny Cook, photography
Alyssa Gorelick, photography

25.08.05 – 04.09.05

Afterlife brings together four Los Angeles-based artists working in photography and video. These artists are investigating the ways in which these mediums can address the tenuous relation to the certainties and uncertainties of what happens after the moment of recording.
The photograph or video as an inanimate object of animate phenomenon has as it’s possibility the means to re-animate through the viewer. Roland Barthes says in Camera Lucida, “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me, it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist; as animation.” In both the work of Bradney Evans and Alyssa Gorelick, re-animation is also the subject. In Evans’ video piece we see broken glass just after the moment of its shattering. The small pops and snaps are evidence of an afterlife of what might be considered inanimate matter. Gorelick reconstitutes her own frame through found cyber-images of bones, reconciling the individual and the collective through a manipulation of past and future.

The work in Afterlife has an ontological line of questioning: to name through concrete representation, the effects and affect of what is unrepresentable. Through image and text, Ginny Cook addresses her parents visions of heaven and hell. And in her manipulations of the photographic process, Kim Schoen questions whether or not time can be said to move fluidly in both directions. If it is well documented that photography is concerned with what has been, then the work in this show operates in the terrain of what might be.