APERTURE SUMMER OPEN: INFORMATION

Aperture is pleased to announce the participating artists in the 2020 Aperture Summer Open, Information. At a moment when ideas about truth and power have been disrupted, these fourteen artists consider how photography portrays and charts our experiences of technology, politics, and the social landscape, from declassified military archives and CIA conspiracy theories, to encounters with race and memory, to the physical spaces where digital information is concealed from the public eye. Together, they broadcast new ways of viewing our present—and our future.

Javier Alvarez / Gus Aronson / Widline Cadet / Emma Cantor / Yu-Chen Chiu / Ash Garwood / Evan Hume / Seunggu Kim / Joshua Rashaad McFadden / Daniel Mebarek / Kean O’Brien / Florence Omotoyo / Rowan Renee / George Selley

The 2020 Aperture Summer Open is curated by Brendan Embser, managing editor of Aperture magazine, with Farah Al Qasimi, artist; Amanda Hajjar, director of exhibitions at Fotografiska; Kristen Lubben, executive director of the Magnum Foundation; and Paul Moakley, editor at large for special projects at TIME.

The Aperture Summer Open is an annual open-submission exhibition. Selected by a jury of leading editors, curators, and writers, the exhibition seeks to reveal and report on key themes and trends driving contemporary photography. The 2020 Aperture Summer Open is presented by Fotografiska New York. Follow @aperturefnd on Instagram and Twitter for news and updates

ALTERED STATES

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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. 

UNKNOWN SUBSTANCES @ FURTHERMORE

UNKNOWN SUBSTANCES BY EVAN HUME

MARCH 21, 2015 - APRIL 21, 2015

FURTHERMORE is pleased to debut Unknown Substances—an exhibition of images by recent DC-expat Evan Hume. The artist’s recent work reproduces and enlarges documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to various government agencies such as the FBI, Air Force and the National Archives. Though the finished works are digital prints, his true medium is the generation loss that occurs as these documents have been photocopied from other photocopies, scanned, printed, reduced, enlarged, sharpened, emailed, and printed again.

As each successive transaction degenerates these documents’ DNA, it also transforms its information into a fossilized visual vocabulary. Though most of the original content may have been redacted or utterly unknowable, a stark, black-and-white crust has been introduced that reveals the history of this chain of command. Perhaps reproduced works can radiate Walter Benjamin’s aura.

Was it coincidence that classified documents proliferated in parallel with the visual tropes of Abstract Expressionism in post-war America? Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell redacted and obscured matrices of canvas, echoing the paranoia that malevolent forces were at work: bureaucratic, extraterrestrial and possibly supernatural. Denials in paint and toner, revived and amplified in the post-9/11 era, as federal agencies play their cards closer, while Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden react equally and oppositely.

While Hume’s work embodies this anxiety, it also suggests that for whatever information lost, these documents also gain a life of their own—a step away from conspiracy. The fact that this visual information can be seen through the lens of concealment, redaction, and now declassification allows us to comb these images for alternate meanings and infatuations.

In conjunction with the exhibition, FURTHERMORE & HUME will release Aesthetics of Bureaucracy, a 40-page zine including additional visual ephemera and outtakes (edition of 150).


ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Evan Hume was born in Upstate New York and grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. He studied photography at Virginia Commonwealth University and earned his MFA from George Washington University in 2011. Recent exhibitions include OPTIONS at Arlington Arts Center, Body of Work at Studio 1469, and Ghosted at Delicious Spectacle. He currently lives in Richmond, VA and is a lecturer at George Washington University and College of Southern Maryland.