Curator / Chris Engman

Façade

Thom Heileson
Shawn Landis
Isaac Layman
Anne Mathern
Tim Roda
Adam Satushek
Ross Sawyers
Todd Simeone
Amir Zaki
Claude Zervas
Jenny Zwick

October 5 – 28, 2006

Façade is a survey of contemporary photography that emphasizes the constructed and artificial nature of the medium.

Rapid advances in imaging technology have freed photography from expectations that previously burdened the medium. Supplanted to some extent by video in its social responsibility to document the world and its events, fine art photographers are more than ever turning inward to matters more personal, abstract and philosophical. Freed of its presumed conveyance of truth, photography is now in a prime position to question our presumptions about everything from how we see and perceive our world to how we think, feel and act. This power rests in part on photography’s now ambiguous relationship to truth and reality, an ambiguity that many contemporary photographers are exploiting to good effect.

Photography excels at pointing out our misperceptions, for example: the gulf that sometimes exists between how we see and how we think we see, how we think and how we think we think; the inconstant and constructed nature of memory; and the social constructs we live in and are sometimes not aware of. Each of the artists in Façade makes work that in some way addresses these issues.

Read Regina Hackett's review of the show in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Read The Stranger arts writer Jen Graves' review of the exhibition