‘Picture/Thing’ Exhibit At Wesleyan Straddles Photography, Sculpture

By Susan Dunne | Hartford Courant

PUBLISHED: February 23, 2015 at 2:39 p.m. | UPDATED: December 12, 2018 at 8:11 p.m.

Somewhere in the last dozen years or so, the art of photography underwent a transformation that was impossible to ignore. “What’s different in this millennium is the dematerialization of the photograph,” said Jeffrey Schiff, referring to photographers who don’t print out their jpegs. “It seemed to shift the ground regarding what photos are.”

Schiff said the Instagram age is an opportune time to revisit the expectations of the medium. With Sasha Rudensky, he co-curated “Picture/Thing,” an exhibit of work straddling the line between photography and sculpture. “Picture/Thing” is on exhibit for just one more week at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University.

Work by Kendall Baker, Isidro Blasco, Rachel Harrison, Leslie Hewitt, Jon Kessler, Anouk Kruithof, Marlo Pascual, Mariah Robertson, Erin Shirreff and Letha Wilson hybridize the two media.

Shirreff creates sculptures, photographs them and prints out the photos as if they were pages in a book. Wilson assembles photos of natural wonders on a hanging canvas with freeform chunks of concrete. Wilson also created a funny piece, a photo printed on a rusty steel plate, face-down on the floor so visitors can’t see the image.

Kruithof prints out photographs on a large-scale, unconventional surfaces and leans them against each other, forcing the viewer to walk around, as with a sculpture, to get the whole impression. Kessler uses mirrors, tricked-out cameras and optical maneuvers to put viewers into his pop-culture clip art.

The most spectacular work is by Robertson, who exposed a 164-foot scroll of photo paper while pouring chemicals onto it and hung the completed work from the Zilkha’s tall ceiling. Abstract images come spilling onto the floor in a multicolored waterfall.

“PICTURE/THING” will be at Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, until March 1. An artists’ panel with Hewitt, Kessler, Wilson, Rudensky and Schiff will be Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 4:30 p.m. wesleyan.edu.