Images That Speak

Michele Abeles, Shannon Ebner, Ryan Foerster, Susanne Kriemann, Steve McQueen, Arthur Ou, Ryan Peter, Eileen Quinlan, Matt Saunders, Stephen Waddell

Satellite Gallery, Vancouver

Curated by: Christopher Eamon

Presentation House Gallery and Capture Photography Festival announce Images that Speak, the lead exhibition for this year’s festival.

Jointly commissioned by Capture and Presentation House Gallery in partnership with Satellite Gallery, this group exhibition surveys ten international and local contemporary artists, whose works question the ways in which photographic images speak. The artists employ techniques that tear away and displace the legibility of images. Retooling the usual mechanisms of production and pictorial conventions, they create work along a spectrum ranging from full authorial control to complete abandonment. Held in common is an expanded notion of the photographic that has led each artist to unique experiments with and alterations of photography’s depictive realism.

At the heart of Images that Speak is a single slide and audio piece by notable artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, entitled 7th November (2001). A projected image shows a close up of a man’s shaved and scarred head, while a voiceover tells of a fatal accident that changed his life forever, leaving the viewer to parse fact from fiction. In Shannon Ebner’s photographic signs, language and image are brought together. Responding in part to the ubiquity of digital images, some of the artists forfeit cameras altogether and take inspiration from early modernist photographers. Ryan Peter’s ‘autograms’, which integrate drawing, painting and darkroom processes, relate to these historical precedents, as do Eileen Quinlan’s abstractions.

That an image can be said to speak rests almost entirely on its reception by viewers, an understanding that has been the subject of philosophical inquiry since the industrial revolution. At the intersection of this intangible facet of photography is the ever-evolving relationship between the moving and still image. Through a subtle montage aesthetic, Stephen Waddell’s cinematic photographs depict found scenes that register as captured moments of contemporary life. In disrupting our reception of photographic images, Images That Speak offers insights on the edges of photography’s limits and its fundamental richness.

To see a list of artist biographies please go to the Capture Photography Festival website at http://capturephotofest.com/exhibitions/images-that-speak/