MIRROR LAMP HAMMER :: Anthea Behm

4.15.17

CUNSTHAUS

CUNSTHAUS is proud to celebrate its one-year anniversary with the presentation of a new photo-based series by Anthea Behm, a critically engaged artist who works between the mediums of photography, video, drawing, and performance.

Behm’s photograms engage the connections between two seemingly distinct media: drawing, characterized by gesture and the artist’s hand, and photography, an ostensibly objective representation of the world around us. To make these camera-less, silver gelatin prints, the artist exposes photographic paper to light, and then draws images—primarily sourced from the internet—on the paper using developer solution. The print then goes through a conventional darkroom photography process: stop bath, fixer, and wash. Represented here are the everyday things whose given reality we take for granted: pockets, shoes, politics, language. In these images, they are shown to exist not solely as objects to be reflected in a photographic instant (as in a mirror), nor merely as the subjective illumination of our minds (as if we created the world through the lamp of our imagination). The world we experience is rather an entanglement of the subjective and the objective, the analog and the digital, the formed and the formless. And our visions, like hammers, maintain the power to reshape and reimagine the forms of our existence.