Selective Memory
Ross Carlisle, Elise P. Church, Tasha Doremus, and Rachel Guardiola
Click to view artwork in the online store.
Friday, September 20th- Saturday, October 26th
Opening Reception Friday, September 27th from 5:30-8 pm
Closing Reception Friday, October 25th from 5:30-8 pm.
From its birth as a new technology, photography has been both a documentary medium and an unreliable narrator. Through editing with paint, collage, darkroom, and creatively destructive processes, Ross Carlisle, Elise P. Church, Tasha Doremus, and Rachel Guardiola use photography as a starting point for the creation of evocative, implausible scenes.
Taking photos is a way of transforming memories into a concrete object. Tasha Doremus utilizes a self-referential, generative process of condensing the passing of seasons into a single image. On several trips to Iceland, she photographed her immediate surroundings, printed them, and brought the prints back to the location they depict at a later time. She sliced the prints in a way so that the wind blows through the view of the past, revealing its imperfect alignment with the present. At times, the banners are set ablaze, adding a further element of unpredictability to the daunting task of capturing fleeting moments.
Elise P. Church creates composited, selectively edited collages from other peoples’ discarded memories. The intriguing compositions emphasize negative space and suggest the artificiality of only preserving our favorite parts of an experience. The inhabitants of these scenes have been removed, and the gentle palette of 1960s prints contributes to a sense of serene melancholy.
Rather than utilizing personal photos as source material, Ross Carlisle’s source materials are the most algorithmically appealing landscapes available via Google Earth. He paints monolithic monuments imposingly erected in the middle of places where clearly they do not belong. The monoliths serve as a metaphor both for our blocked ability to view reality and the human compulsion to claim all territory as our own.
Rachel Guardiola underlines the two-dimensional nature of the “artifacts” populating the fantastical yet believable worlds in her images. Scenes born from experimental darkroom processes emphasize the picture plane. What could be an iceberg or a mountain is replaced by a torn bit of color placed alongside visual references scientific environmental analysis.
Gallery hours are Tuesday and Thursday 12-6 pm, Friday 11 am-5 pm, Saturday 11 am-3 pm, by appointment or chance. We are participating in Philadelphia Open Studio Tours Saturday, October 12th from 12-6 pm.
