Renwick Gallery is pleased to announce Reading, Talia Chetrit’s first solo exhibition with Renwick Gallery. The exhibition includes a series of new photographs created over the past year.

Chetrit relies on the inherent deception of photography to play with contradictions, oppositions and impossibilities. The resulting images expand upon and collapse the historical methods of photography. How do we decipher images when the defining specifications of photography have become ever harder to ascribe?

Reading refers to the act of interpreting visual stimuli and analyzing ‘the photograph’. These photographs are about seeing an image and understanding the formal complexity or manner in which they are made. Reading uses experimentations with perception and abstraction to look at the medium of photography itself, and its ability to transform reality or create a new existence.

Working with items commonly found in a photographer’s studio, Chetrit uses objects such as paper, fabric, and lights to construct scenes through the camera—giving visibility to moments that might otherwise be imperceptible. She arrives at her images through experimentation and often relies on chance. Subverting the conventional supportive role of photographic staples such as black velvet, strobes and gels, Chetrit makes them integral to the image and elevates their meaning. Using processes that range from the photogram to the scanner bed, the images comment on traditional and contemporary methods of photography.

Influenced by Surrealism and the occult, Chetrit creates illusions based on and resulting in the uncertainty of plausibility of photography. The images play with the viewer’s expectations and associations. They bring forward the medium’s historical relationship between visibility and invisibility, the real and the un-real, the subjective and the objective, and contradictions and oppositions.

Talia Chetrit lives and works in New York City. Recent exhibitions include, After Color, [curated by Amani Olu], July 2009, Bose Pacia, New York, NY; Palomar: Experimental Photography, June 2009, Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; Full of Light [curated by Dirk Knibbe] in honor of Bruce Connor, November 2008, 610 S. Main, Los Angeles, CA; The Form Itself, September 2008, Priska Juschka Fine Art, New York, NY.