This Synthetic Moment

Exhibition: 18 Jan 2018 – 10 Mar 2018
Opening: 18 Jan 2018, 18

This Synthetic Moment
Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Photo shoot at a school for one of the many modeling groups who had begun to embrace natural hairstyles in the 1960s), c. 1966, archival pigment print, 15 x 15 in (38.1 x 38.1 cm). Courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present This Synthetic Moment, curated by David Hartt, on view January 18 through March 10, 2018.

A picture of one woman looking at another, a portrait
of a man holding a camera, a portrait of several
women in a schoolyard, a picture of a dancer
recumbent, and a picture of several ships.

A crisis of borders, a fold in time, a rupture in space.
An assertion of gradience.

I was having a hard time describing how I was feeling
and then Thomas said “synthetic” and it stuck in my
mind. I wanted something porous, a polymeric
structure where the voice, agency, geography, and
temporality of others collude to produce a
more compelling version of the world. Brixton, Los
Angeles, Accra, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, etc., spinning a
new distributed off-axis center.

I was having a hard time describing what I was
seeing. So I'll show you instead. Pictures of power
and pride and grief and desire and confusion and
community and celebration and abandonment and of
a wandering itinerant solitude.

I want to hold all of these things together in
this synthetic moment.

The exhibition brings together a disparate group of
artists who use photography almost as a will to power,
an assertion of their own positionality. A compound
description of the world as vast and contingent. -
- David Hartt, 2017

Artists

Works

  • James Barnor, NIFA NIFA, 1974, Lambda print, , 27 3/5 x 27 3/5 in (70.1 x 70.1 cm). Courtesy the artist and October Gallery, London.