“No Looking After the Internet,” April 23 at Gallery TPW R&D

No Looking After the Internet
Co-facilitated by Chris Curreri
Tuesday 23 April
7:30 pm
Gallery TPW R&D
(1256 Dundas St. W.)

For the April meeting of No Looking After the Internet, artist Chris Curreri presents a collection of found photographs that elude easy interpretation. While the aim of the looking group is to experiment with practices of looking without the help of the framework of the gallery exhibition or the caption, Curreri’s found images are radically without context. Comprising 90 self-portraits by the same subject, these are “difficult images” of a unique kind: the conditions of the photographs’ production, and their intended audience, are difficult to puzzle out, and the purpose of our looking at them is equally ambiguous. There is no obvious way to instrumentalize the complex affective ranges they elicit in the viewer. The aim of this meeting of No Looking is to investigate this discrepancy between what the photographs show and what we, as viewers, can do to make meaning with and from them.

Chris Curreri is a Canadian artist who works with film, photography and sculpture. His work is premised on the idea that things in the world are not defined by essential properties, but rather by the actual relationships that we establish with them. Recent exhibitions include: Surplus Authors at the Witte de With, Rotterdam (2012); Beside Myself at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2011); Something Something at the University of Toronto Art Center (2011); An Unpardonable Sin at castillo/corrales, Paris (2010); and Perceptions and their Arousal at the Agnes Etherington Art Center, Kingston (2008). Recent film screenings include: Image Forum Festival, Japan; Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata, Argentina; and the Toronto International Film Festival, Canada. He holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.
www.chriscurreri.com

No Looking After the Internet is a monthly “looking group” that invites participants to look at a photograph (or series of photographs) they are unfamiliar with, and “read” the image out-loud together. Chosen in relation to an exhibition, an artist’s body of work, or an ongoing research project, the looking group will focus on difficult images that present a challenge to practices of looking. If these images ask the viewer to occupy the position of the witness, No Looking offers the space and time to look at these photographs in detail: to return to these difficult scenes in another context where we can look at them slowly and unpack our responses to the image.

Premised on the idea that we don’t always trust our interpretive abilities as viewers, the aim of No Looking is to examine the differences between witnessing and looking. How does a slower form of looking allow us to be self-reflexive about our role as spectators? How do we look at these images differently when we interpret them with a community of others?

No Looking takes its inspiration and name from No Reading After the Internet, an out-loud reading and discussion group facilitated by cheyanne turions and Alexander Muir that meets regularly in Toronto and Vancouver (http://noreadingaftertheinternet.wordpress.com/).