chashama presents Color Conflagrations, an exhibition by Sean Wrenn.

Installed in the eastern half of the former Donnell library across from MoMA, Sean Wrenn’s immersive photomontage works transmute “photographs as memories” into flowing geological strata of optical engagement.  The layered, timeless photo-image spaces record the threshold between dreaming and consciousness, offering recorded memories for the viewer’s visual-neurological, associative interpretation. As a ‘scrapworm’ installation, the visual content draws upon archives of original imagery documenting the East Williamsburg Industrial Park and English Kills Canals area landscape.   The digital image recording mediums and physical fragmentations of sean wrenn’s montage works and interactive installations attempt to capture time, while also suggesting self-referring, artifactual significance. Circumstances of digital technocracy, economic overextension, and underlying violence reveal a ubiquity of Creative Destruction. As photos mark time in a continuum of change, the destructive combination of images quests for something both of but also self-critically beyond image-saturated contemporary urban experience.   The Situationist International Artist-writer Ivan Chtcheglov recognized that “all cities are geological” in his 1953 S.I. Anthology manifesto “Formulary for a New Urbanism.”   Color Conflagrations includes 9 large-scale photomontage works and an active-working installation (incl. 4 smaller montage works, photography, video, montage process, and interactive performance) that visually explore Chtcheglov’s realization that: “We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary.”