ALTERED STATES
VALET
509 E. Franklin Street
Richmond VA
Opening Reception:
Friday October 6, 2017
7-10PM
In the infinite expanse of photographs there are those that wander in a state of somnambulism, speaking in tongues and mutating as they move ever further away from their points of origin. In order to awaken these images from their babbling slumber they must be rendered as contemplative objects.
This body of work is comprised of photographs from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Stolen Art File. The images have varying degrees of obfuscation and legibility due to a combination of poor documentation, technical errors, and digital compression. A distorted photograph in the National Stolen Art File is often the only publicly available visual documentation for a listed artwork, existing in a strange space between cultural artifact and abstract data.
The digital image files taken from the database have been printed at the approximate size of the original works to act as pixilated placeholders for the missing works and give form to the digital mediation, circulation, and consumption of art. In these altered states the images embody the contradictions of representation and abstraction, presence and absence.