Fragments, Facts & Fictions: The Cinematic Photograph
August 23 – September 23, 2022
Curated by Antone Dolezal + Tracy Fish
In 1879, a revolutionary invention shook the world with photographer Edward Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope. A predecessor to the movie projector, Muybridge’s hand-cranked device utilized his photographic sequences and commissioned artist renderings to create animations never thought possible. Inspired by Muybridge, Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, bringing the still image to the realm of cinematic motion and forever changing performance art, popular culture, and imagination.
Film and photography have remained significant to each other not just technically, but aesthetically and artistically. Each has borrowed from and lent to the other. Each has envied the qualities and strengths of the other and provided significant contributions to popular culture and our dissemination of the media. Where cinema could emphasize movement and narrative, photography could emphasize stillness and ambiguity. And as the cinematic lighting of film noir and the later genres of neo and pulp-noir grew in the popular imagination, contemporary photographers once again borrowed from the moving image to create aesthetic works only thought possible on the big screen.
Inspired by cinematic approaches of the last century, the artists in this exhibition utilize photography’s ability to gaze into the mysterious and profound. They create realms inspired by cinematic lighting, staging, and performance, but do so with a keen insight into their placement in the world. And while each series stands distinctly on its own, the artists here draw on personal narratives and observations that take us into a nuanced and alternative understanding of the many realities existing within our own shared experience. Fragments, Facts and Fictions is a collection of images that portray just that, the layering of truths and fabrications that construct the many worlds we inhabit, taking us far into the otherworldly and possibly closer to actual authenticity.
Participating artists included Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin, Michael W. Hicks, Natalia Jimenez, Julianne Nash, Anh-Thuy Nguyen, Amrita Stützle, and Kendra Ward.
Antone Dolezal is a visual artist whose body of work employs photography, video, sound, archival materials, and bookmaking to survey the cultural and political dynamics of American history, folklore, and mythology. His work has been exhibited widely and is held in notable public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art – Special Collections, and Yale University’s Collection of Western Americana. Antone is the author of several books including Devil’s Promenade (Overlapse, 2021), co-authored with long-time collaborator Lara Shipley and he is a recipient of the Syracuse University Visual & Performing Arts Fellowship, Snider Acquisition Prize (MoCP), Puffin Foundation Artist Grant and Gomma Grant. His work has appeared in many anthologies and has been reviewed and profiled in the British Journal of Photography, El Pais, GEO, Liberation News, Leica Magazine, National Public Radio, The New Yorker, and Smithsonian Magazine.
Tracy Fish (she/her) is a documentary and fine art photographer, born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her creative work expands genres, using her interest in culture and history as a catalyst to explore themes of memory, place, identity, and familial narrative through photography, audio, and experimental videography. She is also focused on documentation of the physical changes of the land within the Anthropocene. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography and Area Head of Photography at the University of Nevada, Reno, teaching courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Tracy has won various awards and exhibited both nationally and internationally. She received her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University (2015).
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This exhibition was part of our 2022 Curator Series which is supported in part by Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
