Frames: Age of Technology by Omar Shammah
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Artist: behance
A Jenny Holzer bench from Public Art Fund’s new exhibition Common Ground, on view in City Hall Park through November 30, 2012.
(Photo: May 2012)
Arnaud Gerniers. Frame.
FRAME is a strange invitation to question our own gaze when faced with an image. the presence of a frame set up at the centre of a borderline hostile landscape functions as a magnet: our perception of the image oscillates between attraction and repulsion. our gaze, hypnotized by the luminous frame – an iconic and powerful element of the image – fixes on it, in an unfulfilled desire for a new element to see and interpret. one glances at the title, in order to feel less lost, but these geographical references, though they reassure us about the existence of the almost mythical landscape, do not shed additional light …
all one can do is obstinately stare at the photo and cross over to the other side of the frame, into what is not said of the image. mute and tenacious, it offers no form of narration and leaves us no choice but to go see elsewhere, beyond. in this same way, frame frees us from trying to decrypt things and forces us to look within, since we cannot project ourselves onto it. in this state of things, this necessary letting go, we end up “seeing.”
using the same principle as for the photos, the installation shown in the small room creates an intimate relationship and a questioning of what the spectator perceives. the black light troubles one’s vision and pushes away the limits of one’s visual stimulation. this perception of black transforms absence into a mystical poetry.
Tom Burr,
Folding Screen (Yellow), 2003,
wooden board, paint, yellow perspex mirror,
178 x 180 x 5.5 cm / 70.1 x 70.9 x 2.2 ins,
(MA-BURRT-00037)