Insignificant Moments?

A photograph has an uncanny ability to give a second life to the unnoticed, intimate spots of time that occupy our daily lives, imbuing them with strange new layers of depth. These works evoke a durational moment or the residual presence of human interaction, and push the viewer further to investigate what lies just beneath the surface of visibility-sometimes to disturbing ends.

Jessica Craig-Martin captures an image of golden metallic stilettos beneath a restroom stall in Golden Showers. A fortuitous moment of unplanned color coordination, it's both provocative and playful, yet Craig-Martin also introduces a voyeuristic sense of probing with her photographic lens. Confronted with a total invasion of intimacy, we are left to consider social-cultural norms that infringe upon physical and psychological private moments.

Andres Serrano's Child Abuse, from the artist's The Morgue series, renders a photographic close-up of a human ear. What at first appears to be a simple anatomical snapshot transforms into an intensely provocative exploration of a dead body and the details that resulted in its death. The title of the work heightens our emotional relationship to the work, inciting both intrigue and fear as we begin to question and comprehend the image Serrano presents before us.

Jonas Bendiksen's photograph, meanwhile, is much more innocent, portraying the youthful and emotive image of a young boy. Binoculars glued to his face and in search of something beyond our view, he conjures memories of childhood. However, as the boy never could have known, Bendiksen's work today is prized as photographs of forgotten people, unrecognized countries, and isolated communities that formed after the collapse of the USSR.

The works in this collection capture an intense vulnerability, often exposing a rawness or openness in their subjects. This series looks at these seemingly "insignificant moments" and probes deeper into the study of emotions that all of us feel or have felt at some point in our lives. These moments, often unnoticed by the people living them, are rendered melancholically poetic by the camera, creating lingering and enduring presence on the psychological conscience of the artist and the viewer.