Adam Schreiber, Whitehouse Switchboard, 1969 - 2001, 2010. Inkjet print on archival paper. Courtesy the artist and Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York.Today's issue of …might be good, a contemporary art e-journal based in Austin, Texas, includes my review of Anachronic, a solo exhibition of works by Austin-based photographer Adam Schreiber. An excerpt:
Continue reading here.Adam Schreiber’s small solo exhibition at Sasha Wolf Gallery [in New York] is largely inspired by his research at three archival facilities: the Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and J. J. Pickle Research Center. The connection between these annals is, to an Austin outsider, as much a mystery as the artist’s photographs. Schreiber’s mixed bag of images—an old switchboard, a model moon, a set of toothbrushes with a presidential seal, a nigh-lit stadium and a forest landscape, for instance—look entirely unrelated rather than, as the exhibition title Anachronic implies, out of chronological order. This might compel one, just as archives do, to dig.
However, the history behind Schreiber’s subjects is only slightly more engaging than the photos themselves. [1] Upon consultation of this history, Schreiber’s photographs, like the scrambled pieces of a boxed puzzle, start to make sense in view of the bigger picture. His rejection of linear and written narrative affirms the obvious: how we view objects is largely a result of how they’re framed.
1 comments: