Forbidden Views

The cutouts are in place of questions that will not be answered.

FORBIDDEN VIEWS   2017  ink on acrylic with bamboo 8 x 11 x 9

 

I was invited to view the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of glass lantern slides and in the process several were deaccessioned to me.  On closer inspection, some of the images were not documentation of the Metropolitan’s collection, but instead, the private photographs of a photographer who snapped images of women looking away from the camera.

One wonders if the women knew they were being photographed, and how the images wound up in a collection meant to document ownership. Furthermore, what does it mean to de-accession a person, or an image of a person? Ideas of ownership, documentation, provenance and cultural identity are central to re-shaping the role and practices of major art institutions today.

Viewers are required to position and re-position themselves in order to register the layered images and look through the cutouts to the next image.