color conflagrations

by sean wrenn

 

chashama Donnell Windows

20 West 53rd Street

(btwn 5/6, closer to 5th)

New York, NY

 

December 1 - 19, 2010

 

Please join us for hot cocoa amidst the midtown holiday buzz to celebrate the opening of my Chashama window shows!

 

Thursday, December 2, from 7 - 8 pm. S. side (across from MoMA)

 

color conflagrations and extra-dimensional photogrammetry will be on view in the [regrettably] closed Donnell Library Windows through December 19. If you can't make it to the sidewalk opening, I do hope you get to pass by the 24/7 exhibit at some point!

 

about the work in the large East Windows

sean wrenn's immersive photomontage works transmute “photographs as memories” into flowing geological strata of optical engagement. The layered, timeless photo-image spaces record the threshold between dreaming and consciousness, offering recorded memories for the viewer’s visual-neurological, associative interpretation. Combined with Astronomical inspirations and “implicate orders,” the visual content draws upon archives of original imagery documenting the East Williamsburg Industrial Park and English Kills Canals area landscape. 

 

Overcrowded, unsustainable, and interwoven with inherited violence, contemporary reality is often as grim as cyclical history seems to have expected. Much like the optimism of digital acceleration and 21st Century military occupations, Victorian technological optimism gave way to peaking industrialism, social upheaval, war, genocide, and capitalist-crisis-induced corporate reorganization from 1915 to the 1970’s. We are now at another critical turning point. 

 

The image recording mediums and physical fragmentations of the works attempt to capture time, while also suggesting self-referring, artifactual significance. Circumstances of digital technocracy, real estate in transition, and economic overextension ever more reveal the ubiquity of metropolitan Creative Destruction. As photos mark moments in a continuum of change, the destructive combination of images quests for something reflective of, but also self-critically beyond, image-saturated contemporary urban experience. 

 

Wrenn works numerous interdisciplinary day jobs, including library management and patron research assistance at the International Center of Photography. She met Susan Kleckner at ICP and participated in her intensive “Daily Practice” course over 3 terms. Developing directly from relationship with Susan (1941-2010), the "Color Conflagrations" exhibition is gratefully dedicated to her memory.

 

http://scrap.j-3.org/

http://www.scrapworm.info/