Carolina Grau /Curator
Un Autre Point de Vue / Another Point of View Gerard Byrne, Marcelline Delbecq, Peter Piller, Józef Robakowski and Amie Siegel at La Galerie Centre d'art contemporain, Paris, 2010
The history of the visual image has progressed along with the development of the modern metropolis. Photography, the moving image, television and new digital media have evolved as cities have grown and expanded. We are now living in a visually saturated culture, where you can take a virtual tour of a city that you have never visited; you can always find a street with the help of the iPhone, and you can see a movie of a city being destroyed by spectacular special effects. Is this new visual world changing our relationship with and perception of the city itself? Does it change the way we see ourselves in relation to the city? We live in a society where the visual image has become ubiquitous and we are completely dependent on images in our daily lives. This con- stant bombardment of images is overwhelming. We are so surrounded by images that we don’t even register them anymore. Has the meaning of the image changed? Do images have the same sense of reality as before?
The exhibition “Another Point of View” examines how artists work with images of the everyday and give them a different meaning. The artists search and investigate our cities and surroundings, making us stop and look at imagery that we have ignored and overlooked. Considering our world from new positions, they bring into focus small details as well as the big picture. “Another Point of View” presents a new manner of viewing things, a new standpoint from which something is observed and a story is related, a different attitude.
The five artists in the exhibition share an interest in the possibilities of presenting past and present, and blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. They investigate omitted foot- age, take new pictures and tell stories. We accompany them on their walks, drifting through the city, discovering street corners, shop windows and views from the tops of buildings.
The title 'Images or shadows of divine things' is also that of a text by the American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), an upholder of the Puritan tradition who believed that the future of the world was prefigured in the Bible.
Made in the United States, Images or shadows of divine things is a photographic series begun in 2005. While contemporary works, these black and white images marked by a 1950s American aesthetic reminiscent of Walker Evans conjure up an earlier time: thus shop windows, street scenes and other realities of daily life take us back, factitiously, to a bygone era.
View while listening to the sound work of Marcelline Delbecq, Paradis (Paradise), 2007
The title 'Images or shadows of divine things' is also that of a text by the American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), an upholder of the Puritan tradition who believed that the future of the world was prefigured in the Bible.