PHOTO-FINISH

HOLLY LYNTON: Shorn (2011), C-print, 30 x 40 inches

featuring Kristin Anderson, Christine 
Callahan, Bil Durgin, and Holly Lynton

Station Independent Projects
138 Eldridge Street, Suite 2N.

May 11 - June 5, 2016

Reception: Wednesday, May 11, 6-9 PM

Photographs tell the truth. That has always been their role, and their burden at times when art needed them to do otherwise. In order to tell a story the photograph often has to diverge from its prosaic role as the purveyor of straightforward meaning. What we view in a photograph may often seem to present a situation or scene in which we could easily place ourselves, yet their very details—facts to an untrained eye—are chosen because they fulfill an aesthetic idea that is not stated. As the artistic practice of photography has evolved, with technological advancements filtering into the presentational mode of exhibitions, it has become more common to read the topical fabric of the picture as a poetically driven moment captured first by the camera itself, second by its author’s creative pruning, and finally by the responsive intelligence of the viewer. 

The artists in PHOTO-FINISH each have reasons or objectives that mold the sense of purpose inherent to their work. Their oeuvres are not limited to a single message, but to the texture of meaning fulfilled by the veracity of their indivdual visions. Kristin Anderson documents the hidden realm of appearances by which tourists seeking to obsessively document relics or sites in the Holy Land are reduced to a single motive: devotion. Christine Callahan mines the lost register of emotional reflection in her series “Edge of Happiness” in which chance encounters with spaces and perspectives open up the potential for discovery so that form, light, and connection to place can bring knowledge and joy simultaneously. Bill Durgin explores the loaded genre of the human nude in set pieces that explode perception, heightening sensuality while complicating the voyeuristic aspects so that beauty becomes part of an equation whose solution is obscure at best. Holly Lynton explores rural communities that struggle to maintain their agarian traditions, balancing both a domination of, and a surrender to, the natural life all around them.