Group Exhibition You May Feel Something

Faced with the overwhelming influence of the photographic image in contemporary life, the artists in this exhibition have found a way to fight back. In You May Feel Something they work to control the onslaught of images by using photographs as the raw material for the making of artworks.

While the use of photos in collaged-based works is long established in art practice, in recent years contemporary artists have continued to push beyond the boundaries of photography, experimenting with numerous techniques that destroy the integrity of the photograph itself. This exhibition looks at powerful examples of these practices, which include submerging photos in water, obliterating the image with inks, baking photos in tanning beds or embroidering on them. The resulting images are almost painterly and lack the crisp pictorialist edge we typically attribute to the photograph. Yet, traces of each photo remains and along with them, a connection to history, to a kind of reality that only a photograph can imply. 

Curated by Bridget Donahue and Mia Nielsen