Wallspace is pleased to present Mark Wyse’s new body of work, Seizure, a photographic installation combining his own photographs with framed reproductions of work by other artists and illustrators. For Wyse, this gesture creates a form for investigating the space between pictures — enabling viewers to move beyond the subjects of the photographs and into the thoughts behind them. His last show at the gallery, Disavowal, consisted entirely of reproductions culled from his personal library, and attempted to make visible the underlying, often-repressed discourses contained both within the images and between artists. If Disavowal can be seen as an abstract show of portraits, the new work points back towards the image itself. Here, the image is both connected to and displaced from its maker. For Wyse, “The photographic image is intimate and defensive at the same time. The photograph is less a representation of the world than a representation of a thought that reflects a relationship to the world. The paradox is that we see the world, but feel the thought.” In Seizure, Wyse embraces the image as a free-floating mental object that both invokes and projects thoughts stripped from their source.

The exhibition is accompanied by a newly commissioned text by Charlie White titled, “Hard Copy, Soft Image,” and will be published in book form by Damiani Editore in the fall of 2010. Preview copies of the book are available at the gallery.

Mark Wyse lives and works in Los Angeles, where he has been making photographs for nearly twenty years. His work is held in many major museum collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Yale University Art Museum, New Haven; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. His most recent essay on photography, “Too Drunk to Fuck (On the Anxiety of Photography),” was published by LACMA in Words Without Pictures, Edited by Alex Klein.