Lossy
Work by Jeremy Bolen, Raquel Ladensack, Christopher Meerdo, Paul Nelson
Nearly every minute of every day we are inundated with photographic images. The instantaneity of digital photography coupled with internet sharing has shifted our temporal awareness. And as a continuation of photography’s complicated relationship with truth, the expansiveness of Photoshop has further skewed the validity of images once trusted as authentic. These images have come to shape our consciousness. It is this multitude of images that recontextualize photographs once held as autonomous and idiosyncratic. Our photographs are now part of a larger conglomeration of image equivalents, produced by a global authorship.
Lossy presents four artists that have invested heavily in the limitations of the photographic medium and respond to this contemporary notion of ubiquity and propagation. Both the analog (in Ladensack and Bolen’s work) and the digital (in Meerdo and Nelson’s work) contain a kind of interference, a warble, which give us clues to the underpinnings of the construction of language. Photography, often considered to be a hyper-manicured and infallible system of referentiality, is a medium that typically strives for accuracy, clarity, and analogous representation. Lossy presents a decidedly antithetical position to the regularity of photographic representation. The four, while formally trained in photography, seek to push the boundaries of the photographic medium through film, painting, sculpture, and installation.