Five artists working in film and photography reframe our sense of past and place.
Thursday, April 16 - Sunday, August 16, 2015
Alternative Modernisms captures the evolving relationship between the historical and contemporary image through diverse personal and cultural perspectives of five contemporary artists: Harun Farocki, Leslie Hewitt, Pedro Lasch, Jumana Manna, and Jeff Whetstone.
Each artist enters into a dialogue with history and with art historical traditions of painting - at one remove - through the lens of photography and film. Each finds new spaces in the genres of still life, portrait, and landscape to intervene in the how the past can be told.
They work from the archive, the studio, the museum and the outdoors. They investigate specific and personal histories of place, from Rural Appalachia to Palestine. They work in museums, from the National Portrait Gallery to the Reynolda House Museum of American Art. These divergent responses to modernism take new approaches to visual storytelling and vernacular. They ask us to reframe our understanding of the past.
Curated by Cora Fisher, SECCA Curator of Contemporary Art
