"For his Project Space residency, Matthew Gamber intends to continue an ongoing project titled “Lost Color of God and Man,” an evolving slideshow of three-color separations related to the historical geography of the inventors of Kodachrome, Leopold Godowsky and Leopold Mannes. Shot in Rochester locations where the inventors worked on their early color film experiments, these images serve as a reenactment of the light that the inventors might have experienced. How did they see color before they created a means to replicate it, and how did they imagine their tools recorded it? Gamber plans to create a series of prints of the overlapping images, and translate the slideshow into an artist book proposal for future publication."

"The Aaron Siskind Foundation is pleased to announce the 2017 recipients of the Individual Photographer’s Fellowship offered to U.S. artists working in still photography and photography-based media. The Aaron Siskind Foundation works to promote and protect Aaron Siskind’s artistic legacy, to foster understanding of and appreciation for his work, and to support contemporary photographic art and artists. Aaron Siskind established this grant prior to his death in 1991 to assist independent creative photographers to pursue personal projects without bias to any particular form of the medium.

"This exhibition, Vagabond Time Killers, features the work of 53 emerging artists; the majority of which have come to us as artists-in-residence and have lived and worked here, in Wassaic. The works included depict each artist’s relationship, perception, and interpretation of our current location in space and time, and how art and its context can transform people, places, and ideas. Each of these artists and their work are part of Wassaic’s quirky history, and embody the spirit of the Vagabond Time Killers."

Aperture has invited the artist-run super PAC, For Freedoms, to curate and implement an improvisational exhibition and series of dialogues that investigates the photographic collective as a model for responsive artistic production.

This two-week project will feature live events that bring together several active photography communities to discuss the practices, benefits, and methodologies of collectivity, while focusing on the question of what defines “the political” in art-making today. Each collective is invited to contribute a visual prompt for discussion and selected works to be presented in the space; the main propulsion for this activity, however, will be a series of in-person activities including meet-ups, salon-style conversations, and other events.

The collectives included in the exhibition are EverydayClimateChange, Invisible Borders, Kamoinge,Piece of Cake, Rawi(ya), and WRRQ.

"It follows that no landscape can be exclusively devoted to the fostering of only one identity. Our imaginative literature abounds in descriptions or utopias where everyone is civic-minded, and there are many descriptions of the delights of living in harmony with nature as certain pretechnological societies presumably did. But we sense that these visions are not true to human nature as we know it, and that these landscapes can never be realized; and that is why many of us find utopian speculations unprofitable." — J. B. Jackson

Fictional color
Broken games
Retired diagnostics
Functional fixedness
Corrupted transfers
Without instructions

Using a variety of processes, this exhibition is a play on the photograph as document. Documents are analogous to tools; they maintain a specific functional fixedness and resist reconfiguration by the user (reader). Useful documents substantiate history, whereas useless documents have no history. What was full of information is now empty.

This winter Transformer Station presents UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image, an exhibition featuring 11 national and international artists who are exploring the ephemeral image in a wide variety of ways with and without cameras, in still images as well as video. Although photographic images existed long before, the birth of photography is marked by the date when we learned to “fix” a representative image on a light sensitive surface permanently.

Since then, the truth of photographic representation has been often questioned and much discussed. Less debated, but just as questionable is the permanence of the photographic image. Of course, eventually, all surfaces decay and images fade, but the artists in this exhibition embrace the fleeting nature of the image that is created by light and is eventually destroyed by it.

"Model-based photographs can have a distinctly digital appearance. But models themselves can be made of anything, including massive data structures, so these similarities are anything but superficial. Matthew Gamber has made several photographic images that demonstrate how traditional physical models are continuous with computational models. In Stanford Bunny (x2) (2012) and Utah Teapot (2013), the titular objects seem to emerge seamlessly from a uniform color field of blue or gray. The effect is eerie, and reminiscent of the ganzfeld hallucinations produced in psychophysical experiments; they appear to be conjured up by the brain’s own restless inability to cope with structureless input."

Using a variety of photographic processes, the exhibition is an exploration of the meanings constructed around photography and the rules that govern its use. This exhibition is a survey of Gamber’s recent work based around his latest project, “Basic Ingredients of the Complex World,” his examination of how photography is both documentary and illusory – a paradox he demonstrates through experimentation with three-dimensional techniques.

“Photography is a language by which we communicate information and ideas,” explains Gamber. “To be understood, we follow a shared set of rules, a kind of photographic grammar, where the messages implied in our pictures can be understood by others. The best way for me to participate in this dialogue is to create artwork in response to changing syntax throughout the history of photography. I hope viewers will gain broader understanding of how these implied conventions have fostered a variety of readings in the medium.”

"One fundamental aspect of this transformation is key to Gamber’s series Any Color You Like, namely how the shift to monochrome exposes the conditional nature of photographic representation – and even of visual perception itself.

At the same time, a photograph definitely has a sort of informational role–it can describe what something (an event, an object) looks like, but the caveat that Gamber astutely adds is that a photograph will only tell us what something looks like when photographed and that distinction is a considerable one."

Flash Forward, the celebrated emerging artists platform, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Gallery Kayafas is proud to partner in the festivities by highlighting the many achievements of the gallery’s artists and friends that have been a part of this amazing organization’s journey. During the month of April, the gallery will highlight 9 artists from the 10th anniversary edition in the lead up to the annual Flash Forward Festival in Boston.

“Pulse” represents what these artists are currently working, their dedication to creating artwork that is visually compelling as well as intellectually challenging. They bring a lot to the table in terms of their professional engagement in the Boston area and beyond," says Hankins.

"Hagedorn Foundation Gallery is pleased to present a two-person lens based exhibition “New Takes”. Artists Matthew Gamber and Peter Bahouth investigate various approaches to the photographic image, which resonate with a discourse about the philosophy of the medium, and tag ideas about the psychology of perception. Gamber’s work is abstract and technical, using photograms, abstracted photographs, and the projected image to open up a dialogue about surface information and culture."

"Sullivan’s background as a painter informs his photography, which is concerned with layers and texture. He employs various rephotography techniques, and his ethereal landscapes look like watercolors. Meanwhile, Gamber’s photographs trade heavily in the expectation of color and
its absence. One of his images renders a color- blindness test in steely black-and-white. Another converts television color bars to a monochromatic image. Charland’s work appears as a form of anachronistic futurism: fire, light and electricity course through eerie tableaux created from everyday objects. Interspersed with their art are illustrations and photographs from the original Matter, their utilitarianism subverted by this re-contextualization."

In the era of digital manipulation when does an image cease to be a photograph and become something else Photography means "light writing" in greek, but isn’t it really light tracing—a copy where we were expecting reality? Does a photograph summarize an event; so can a photograph of a laser disk summarize the movie held in its binary code? If photographs are now made of pixels, can a wall of pixels be a photograph?

What is another essential quality of “photography”? The endless archive: even before there were billions of photos a day, these fragments of time accumulated in every nook and cranny of society. What happens when the photographer stops making their own images, and instead pulls from these libraries? What new meanings can be created by the rearrangement of these fragments?

"In the forthcoming issue of Conveyor, we will be searching for moments when the properties of a spectre, that which dissolves from our sight, and a spectrum, a continuum or perfection of vision, overlap and counterbalance each other. The trespassing of these apparitions between the material and immaterial worlds can be equally thrilling and terrifying, amorphous and yet revealing. We’re looking for absorbing and unexpected sights—phantom or prismatic images, atmospheric phenomena, news from a secret admirer or an absent friend—things that remind us of sidelong glances, illusory dreams, primal discoveries, and ghosts in the machine."

"Here, on World Television Day—a UN-sanctioned acknowledgment of the medium’s global reach—LightBox presents images of the tube, from the early years to the present day. The oldest, and perhaps eeriest (slide #9), is a photograph of the first true television ever made, invented in 1925 by John Logie Baird. Images of war, technology and political spectacle were plucked from the wires. Matthew Gamber didn’t use a camera at all—he simply held a piece of photo-sensitive paper against a television screen. Rene Burri shot an entire roll of film on Nixon’s televised resignation (the contact sheet mirroring the sequential nature of TV itself). Penelope Umbrico uses found imagery from the Internet. Stephan Tillmans reveals the striking abstract shapes that zap across old TV screens as they’re turned off. Catherine Opie explores the personal and political through a variety of genres—in this case, Polaroids of icons of power on the nightly news."