MARC BARUTH, MATTHEW BAUM, ANTONY CROSSFIELD, ODETTE ENGLAND, STEVE HANSON, DOUG KEYES, CURTIS MANN, DAVID TRAUTRIMAS

KLOMPCHING GALLERY is pleased to announce Visual Morphology, a group exhibition of fine art photographs by contemporary photographers from Australia, Canada, Germany, Britain and the United States.

Visual Morphology turns the ubiquity of the photograph on its head. Collectively, the artists remind us of the ‘act of looking’, each engaging the viewer with various tropes within photography that urge us to scrutinize what we see. Time, memory, visual perception, assemblage and artifact, are each addressed across a range of creative photographic methodologies and conceptual frameworks.

In the work of Marc Baruth, contemporary figures are decontextualized within fictional, digitally-constructed landscapes. Based upon the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, Baruth’s topography is a wonderfully peculiar play on man’s relationship with nature. David Trautrimas, too, fabricates environments. In his case, he positions familiar objects into surreal urbanscapes, drawing upon both function and scale.

This penchant by contemporary photographers, for working with new technologies in expanding the lexicon of the photographic medium, is further evidenced in the work of Antony Crossfield. He presents the viewer with ambiguous, fluid bodies, bringing attention to the notion that self-identity is unstable and permeable. Whereas Baruth, Trautrimas and Crossfield, consciously maintain the visibility of their images as fabricated, Matthew Baum’s imagery is altogether quieter. He contributes to the tradition of street photography, capturing fleeting moments of people in public spaces; but re-presents them as a kind of hyper-reality.

The optical phenomena of the Ishihara Color Test, is effectively applied by Odette England to manipulate the intended meaning and function of family photographs. The viewer’s ability to fill in negative space, both physical and psychological, is a concern that England shares with the artist Curtis Mann, who literally obliterates portions of found snapshots with the use of household bleach. Both artists reconfigure the context of the photograph, bringing attention to image, object and memory.

Doug Keyes also turns his attention to these concerns, by making multiple exposures of the pages of carefully selected books. This layering of imagery, results in a wonderful symphony of detail that isn’t quite there, sparking our imagination to complete the narrative. Keyes reveals what the eye can’t naturally see, as does Steve Hanson with his long exposures of rush hour traffic, in which the movement of cars are erased by time, revealing the solid architecture of roadways.