The Handwerker Gallery is proud to present DARK PASSAGE, which will remain on view from Wednesday, October 26 through Sunday, December 11. Featuring paired bodies of work by artists Sarah Sutton (Department of Art) and Ben Altman, DARK PASSAGE welcomes the progression of Fall with an exhibition exploring the tangle of human experience in a chaotic world.
Contextualized by summer research of Cavan Mulligan (Art History '17) this exhibition is the second exhibition of four exploring Hippocrates' Four Humours. Mulligan's research teases relevant themes from her study of Black Bile/Melancholy to guide the experience of visitors as they consider the work of Sutton and Altman.
THE MORE THAT IS TAKEN AWAY: BEN ALTMAN
Mass graves indicate a society in major crisis. Ben Altman is fascinated by the turning points of modern history and how they form our world. Many such events have taken violent and massive scales; he mourns, memorializes, and reclaims these intractable events by recording performances at his home and by visiting sites of atrocity. Altman’s photographic practice explores the roles of perpetrator, victim, and bystander, with previous bodies of work documenting memorial sites and their tourists, signage, architecture, and landscaping. The More That Is Taken Away is a multiple-year meditation using the mass grave as a central image. Fashioning a monumental earthwork in his own backyard by long-term excavation, modification, and repairs, Altman attempts an open and personal engagement. He hopes, through protracted labor and obsessive photographic and video documentation, to avoid moral certitudes or the static gesture of a formal monument. Altman is informed by the inheritance of a familial Holocaust narrative, his own upbringing in postwar England, and his subsequent emigration. He uses his practice as a tool for both personal and public ownership of collective trauma.
DISSOLVE: SARAH SUTTON
Sarah Sutton’s work relishes in the liminal straddling of images and experiences, exploring how memory, psychological projection, and the deep flatness of the internet collude against landscape to create a hybrid space. In contemporary culture, the index of digital images seem to far outnumber the accrual of sensory experiences in real time over the course of one person’s life. Sutton turns away from the tradition of singular narrative compositions, instead creating flat images that dive into dimensional conflict and collision. Her paintings are intimate portals relating back to the body, referencing contemporary technology’s hand-held ability to dissolve the border between the personal and political, the private and the public, the real and hallucinatory. Sutton’s paintings combine multiple images into a visual ruins which denies passive viewing. Based on dioramas combining flat images, architectural models, folded paper, and paint blobs, Sutton depicts moments where the language and genre of her materials dissolve into spectral uniformity.
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All exhibitions and events at the Handwerker Gallery are free and open to the public. The Handwerker Gallery is open Monday, Wednesday, & Friday from 10am-6pm; Thursdays from 10am-9pm; and Saturday & Sunday from 12pm-5pm. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Mara Baldwin at mbaldwin@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3548. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.
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https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20161025085141801