Spectacle & Scaffolding features the works of contemporary photographic artists who explore the underlying power structures that we live with and participate in daily, but which often seem invisible. Curran, Paglen, Pratt, and slavick reflect upon systems that inscribe and maintain power differentials in the United States and beyond, including the market economy, the labor system and workers, technology and surveillance, the relationship of patriotism to the nation-state, and hierarchical social categories such as race, gender, class, and nationality. Whether by making a portrait of a person or visually mapping an apparatus, the artists present for viewers each of our simultaneous roles as spectators of and participants in these systems of power. Collectively, the photographs serve as a cartography of contemporary hierarchies, visually investigating the physical and social realities of our interactions with power structures, and how we actively take part in them as both spectators and participants.
Spectacle & Scaffolding: Contemorary Photography Museus Hierarchy in Gallery A
Mark Curran; Matthew, Banker
elin O’Hara slavick; Four Cooks
Trevor Paglen; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Springfield, Virginia
Trevor Paglen; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Springfield, Virginia
About the artists
Mark Curran teaches at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin, Ireland and the Visual and Media Anthropology Program, Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. Curran received his Ph.D from the Dublin Institute of Technology. He exhibits internationally, including recent shows at the DePaul Art Museum and PhotoIreland, and publishes, most recently in Photographies. An artist and visual anthropologist, his long-term research project incorporates multi-media installations to address the predatory migration and flow of global capital.
elin O’Hara slavick is a Professor of Visual Art, Theory, and Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. slavick received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an internationally exhibiting artist and author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, with a foreword by Howard Zinn and essay by Carol Mavor, and After Hiroshima, with an essay by James Elkins. She is also a curator, critic, and activist.
Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer at the Center for New Media at the University of California Berkeley. Paglen received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. He shows internationally with numerous one-person exhibits at major art centers and group shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Art Forum. The author of five books, among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.
Greta Pratt is an Associate Professor of Art at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Pratt received her MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz. As a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, her work addresses issues of national identity and American myth. The author of The Wavers, Using History, and In Search of the Corn Queen, she exhibits internationally and has been published in Art in America, New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others.
Additional resources
- Installation Album – On Flickr