HANNAH WHITAKER – COLD WAVE
2014-03-17This show expands on Whitaker’s interest in the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel who introduced the notion of unknowability to mathematics, a field often characterized by certainty. His ideas problematized early 20th century philosophical claims to truth and knowledge, a dialectic inherent to the medium of photography. Whitaker’s interest in Gödel led her to think of the film plane as a formal system—a set of limited variables and operations. The results establish repetitious motifs that occur both within a single image and across multiple photographs.
Employing a 4×5 view camera, she photographs using the intervention of hand-cut paper screens, often layering as many as fifteen in a single image; at times shooting through the screens and at others using them to deform an image selectively after it is shot. These in-camera processes allow her to collapse various moments in time and space onto a single sheet of film. The resulting photographs are suspended between multiple dualities: the handmade and the technical, the geometric and the photographic, the flat and dimensional, or—in the lexicon of Rosalind Krauss—the antireal and the real.
The notion of a formal system is reinforced by her use of the constitute parts of her process as subjects in their own photographs. In Cutouts (Green), Cutouts (Pink) and Cutouts (Orange), Whitaker photographed the paper detritus left behind after cutting her paper screens. She arranged these cutouts on colored paper backgrounds that reappear in different forms in other photographs, establishing material linkages across multiple works. While the photographs contain abstract elements, Whitaker’s subjects can be thought of as resolutely depictive in their familiarity—wintery landscapes, women and still lifes of banal objects. These conventional subjects are thoroughly recognizable, despite gaps in their representation.
Exhibition runs through to April 26th, 2014
M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
California
90069
