Site Unseen

Site Unseen places lens-based works from the Gallery’s permanent collection in dialogue with select loans to explore the way contemporary photographic artists—who start with a documentary impulse to record the landscape—use diverse strategies to create uncanny results. Artists in Site Unseen push the boundaries of their medium by introducing visual distortions or chromatic disturbances resulting from their singular processes to produce images that are simultaneously of this world and alien. Sigmund Freud stated that “the uncanny was not to be found in the exotic but the everyday,” equating the uncanny with that which is familiar and strange at once. The title of the exhibition points to the way artists ask viewers to abandon perceptual habits and demand that they look at the urban and rural sites around us with fresh eyes. Site Unseen reveals artists’ fascination with the camera’s ability to describe the world, while recognizing the play between reality and artifice that inevitably shapes every such account, ultimately questioning the idea of a photograph as a factual record. Artists in the exhibition include Laura Dutton, Marten Elder, Lorraine Gilbert, Rodney Graham, Mark Lewis, Thomas Ruff and Diana Thater.