Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture, curated by Sara Krajewski and co-organized by Independent Curators International and the Henry Art Gallery, on display from October 6 through December 10.

Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture spotlights evolving attitudes toward the appropriation, recuperation, and repurposing of extant photographic imagery. Artists, as both producers and consumers in today’s vast image economy, freely adopt and adapt materials from myriad sources. Images culled from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, television, films, personal and public archives, studio walls, and from other works of art are all fair game. Image Transfer brings together artists who divert commonplace, even ubiquitous, visual materials into new territories of formal and idiomatic expression.

This exhibition proposes that these artists mark the progression of intuitive practices that are thoroughly at ease with today’s hyper-fluid circulation of images. In our digital age of fair use and open source, these attitudes demonstrate how far traditional notions of the authority and primacy of source materials have shifted toward a fluent rethinking of the way we value and interact with images. Image Transfer will explore several questions. How are artists using clipped, copied, grabbed, or downloaded images, and what do such artistic positions relate to the viewer vis-à-vis the work? How do such synthesized images operate in visual culture? Do these works critique our media-saturated age or are they only symptomatic of it? What can these processes and these composite images tell us about the state of photography today?

Artists featured in the exhibition include Sean Dack, Karl Haendel, Jordan Kantor, Matt Keegan, Carter Mull, Lisa Oppenheim, Marlo Pascual, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sara VanDerBeek, Siebren Versteeg, Erika Vogt and Kelley Walker.