Opening reception: Saturday, September 7, 2013
Artist Talk: 7 pm
Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Candles and Games, a project room exhibition of new work by Frank Selby. This is the artist's first solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery. The show consists of graphite drawings on mylar.
Frank Selby draws from press photographs and film stills. The images often depict social unrest—riots or protests—or the aftermath of natural disasters like hurricanes or volcanic eruptions. A Selby drawing is usually a collage of a pair of images or a single image that has been doubled, spliced, or layered over itself and slightly shifted—somehow altered to emphasize movement, conflict, and confusion.
Selby's work explores misinterpretation and miscommunication. He is interested in how we make meaning out of visual material—especially how the limits of an image's capacity for signification often fall short of what we assume or expect.
Linguistic theorists generally agree images have no inherent meaning. They are merely catalysts for interpretations based on a viewer's personal experiences and knowledge of culture and history. Reading an image is a subjective endeavor.
Photographs are popularly seen as objective records of reality—infallible evidence, truth. But as with all images, photographs—even unmanipulated ones—are unreliable signifiers. Photographs of conflicts and natural disasters are especially gross simplifications of the events and people they depict. Reality is always much messier than what can fit into a single, silent, motionless picture.
The drawings in this show are the first pieces of a larger project that Selby calls a “fractured animation” of images with origins scattered across the 20th century. In Candles and Games, photographs from Bloody Thursday (the 1969 riot at People's Park) crash into film stills from The Public Enemy (1931) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Images perhaps reminiscent of socialism, capitalism, violence for the sake of social justice, and crime for self-aggrandizement swirl into a dense and chaotic genealogy of ideas, events, and communication from the last 100 years. Misunderstanding is not only Selby's subject; it is his medium. The historical juxtapositions within and between his drawings are a metaphor for our individual takes on our collective memory: incomplete, untidy, difficult to articulate, probably even misrepresentative.
And the way Selby makes his drawings is a metaphor for his interest in the inability of images to carry meaning. Once he crops, doubles, splices, or recombines an image and decides to draw it, he makes an earnest attempt to perfectly reproduce his source collage, down to every last piece of film grain or photographic noise. But however photographic Selby's drawings may seem, when comparing a finished piece to its source, one sees differences in texture, density, and form. Selby necessarily fails to meet his goal of 1:1 reproduction. Images, too, necessarily fail to carry meaning, just as people necessarily fail to thoroughly express themselves and understand each other.
In our ideal model of communication, information is transmitted to be understood exactly as it was intended. Anything less is a failure, a miscommunication. But perhaps this model is as flawed as expecting reliable signification from an image. Perhaps mutability and slipperiness—the unintended distortions that occur as people communicate or memories fade and mutate—are more accurate models of the way we see, perceive, and live in the world.
Frank Selby was born in 1975 and lives and works in North Carolina. Selby has had solo exhibitions at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina) and the Waterworks Visual Arts Center (North Carolina). He has participated in group shows at institutions including the Drawing Center (New York), the FLAG Art Foundation (New York), and VOORKAMER (Belgium). His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Weatherspoon Art Museum (North Carolina), the Lodeveans Collection (London), and the Anderson Collection (California).