May 15, 2009 – June 19, 2009
Tuesdays–Saturdays (11am–5pm)
The war in Iraq, in its evolving guises, often seems like an abstract idea rather than concrete reality; what impressions we do develop owe a lot to the photographs that feed the news cycle and permeate the web. In three videos and a set of digital prints, Jesse McLean uses Photoshop tools like the "clone stamp" and "magic wand" to rework this visual material, fashioning it into increasingly fractured forms. Her videos foreground the malleability of photographs (no surprise today), but more interesting is how they embody the challenge of grasping a distant reality, even as photographs run riot. Flickering here is the tentative hope that actively grappling with images — picking them apart, patching them up — might break the cycle and lead to a renewed empathy.
– Karsten Lund