There are three bodies of work in Declaimed, all based in photography. We could say that they range from “straight” photography to “substrate” photography.

The earliest work is Taking Pictures. It was created from 2007—2009. At first, I considered the gesture of photographing artworks in museums to be an act that divorced the viewer from the art. But as I continued creating these images, I came to realize that the camera could also generate a unique form of intimacy: it has the effect of filtering out the entire world, focusing one’s vision on just this one thing, and declaring that this moment with the artwork is mine alone.

The structure of the Taking Pictures images was unexpected at first. To imagine that the flickering image on a camera or cell phone screen was a site to be photographed was a radical claim about what could count as a photo. But the intense proliferation of these devices—and especially the ubiquitous marketing of them—turned the image of a pair of hands holding a small screen into something that was suddenly all around us.

Taking Pictures were always candid; the people were never aware that they were being photographed; the layering and duplications that occur inside the images were authentic. So I was struck when I noticed that televisions commercials for cell phones and cameras always included a little disclaimer, stating “screen images simulated.” There were two ironies: first, the commercial is not really showing the thing it is trying to sell; and more profoundly, this little fragment of language is claiming to inform us about a truth that the image itself fails to deliver. As if language were up to the task!

That began the Disclaimers body of work. These are photographs of such phrases as they occur in the commercial world, whether on TV, print ads, or packaging. I figured that since the disclaimer was “freeing” the image from its duty to accurately represent, then that freed me to manipulate the images by painting and drawing on top of them. These interventions are all meant to impose new readings onto those free-floating bits of language.

Working on top of the photo transformed it into a substrate, a surface that bears another image. The Disclaimers had all been “found images,” repurposed from their commercial origin to my more speculative intent. I then imagined taking photographs for the explicit purpose of drawing and painting on them. How would that alter the relationships between the layers?

The works that came out of this are the White Outs. Tangled wires are photographed against empty backgrounds; the prints are mounted to larger canvases; on top, white ink traces over the depicted wires, essentially “canceling out” the subject. These layers echo with many kinds of rhymes, claims, and misunderstandings. The work is direct and highly mediated at the same time.

Declaimed is a photography show. But the picture it presents of photography has less to do with the photographic image as an endpoint than with passing through the “positions” of photography, from up close to slipping away to greater and greater distances. It is my sense that unless we can accurately gauge these positions, we will not be able to judge the claims that photographs wish to deliver. The photograph will effectively be “de-claimed.”

Work by Nicholas Knight.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: 65GRAND, West Town