Mountain Fold is pleased to announce the opening of “Life,” a group show of photography by Hisham Bharoocha, Ports Bishop, Ari Marcopoulos, Sebastian Mlynarski, Santiago Mostyn, and Peter Sutherland. Interested in creating a visual poetry of experience, each artist exhibits a collection of images that illustrates intersections between photography and living.

In an age when every person can be the photographer of his own life, these artists respond by connecting themselves with the point-and-shooting public. Rather than defining their art in opposition to the proliferation of casual images that people post in electronic and physical spaces, images through which people attempt to uncover who they are, to signify what they do and what they like, the photographers in “Life” consider the same question: how can photographs engage life? The work presented embraces the notion that through still images, life becomes a time capsule of sorts, an archaeological clue to ways of life past and present. In contrast with the moving image, photography suggests non-linear motion and draws together atemporal points, which do not necessarily relate through causality.

The photographs in this show exist as flash-bulb memories, moments banal or profound, that have been marked indelible because of something so simple as the opening and closing of a shutter. Among the images shared are moments of action and consequence, such as a knife slicing through a stream of tap water; interiors, including a still-life of a plastic bust, plastic flowers, burned CDs, scissors, champagne, and a framed photograph; and a variety of abstracted, brilliantly colored weather shots. “Life” explores what lies beneath the sometimes instinctual, sometimes intellectual capturing of an image. For these six artists, taking pictures of their experiences allows them to more deeply understand life: they store sensations and then revisit the isolated visual input when realizing their photographs. So photography dictates the constant back and forth between the immediate moment of sensory reception and the later, more inward contemplation of meaning. This process of development resembles the human dynamic of living and remembering.

The work plays upon the possibilities and connections an individual’s oeuvre can make both to another body of images and to a narrativizing viewer. Seen together and apart, the artists’ clusters of photographs, arranged like synaptic nodes, hint at how each photographer’s mind works, and how they may mediate life through a vision prism.