| OMA Home > Exhibits > Through a Lens Sharply: Photo Imaginings 
| Barbara Sexton: "Right Leak Left Leak" | The advent of photography in the 19th Century brought about a new age of mechanical reproduction. In our lifetimes photographs have become part of our daily experience - they are the keys to memories and identities; they are used to document histories; they serve as scientific evidence, and they are essential in an era of consumption and advertising. In this exhibit, artists Amy Jorgensen, Barbara Sexton and Marcela Villaseñor filter personal and communal identities through unique perspectives; they all utilize photography with startlingly different results.  | Marcela Villasenor: "Untitled" | Amy Jorgensen’s photographs in the series, Residual Evidence: The Body Archive, veer away from our usual expectations of the medium resembling painterly abstractions, with fields of overlapping color, sensual drips and areas of blinding luminosity. We can sense the tension within a microscopic remnant, a smear on a laboratory slide, as it is enlarged and captured on a glossy surface. It is a revelation, as these impressions of her body become an oddly forensic and disjointed self-portrait where the instantaneous opening and closing of the camera’s shutter has been replaced by a performance turned into visual testimony. The elegant geometry in Barbara Sexton’s work also derives from an investigation that shares science and photography. Her drawings of electromagnetic fields seem to be photo stills from a physics experiment. In other works photo-based images serve as the underlay partially obscured by a layer of transparent color and then again by a graceful pattern that on close inspection reveals the sheen of crisply drawn strokes of graphite. In Symmetry Group, hue and pattern cascade like the braids of Rapunzel as photographic fragments of a hairline are carefully overlapped snaking down as strange topographic maps. References to TV and cinema also resonate within the work.  | Amy Jorgensen:
Residual Evidence:
The Body Archive 01.13.2006 | With their rugged surface and symmetrical order, the mixed media pieces by Marcela Villaseñor bring to mind ancient pre-Columbian codex. The photo image in this case is drawn from the anthropological document, the modern reproductions of Aztec and Maya sacred sculptures. Villaseñor alters these images digitally but then she returns to a more traditional, manual application of these ghostly skins as she transfers them onto textured canvas. The mandala-like compositions with their juxtapositions of pre-Hispanic remnants subtly infer the erosion that results as cultures clash. As their title implies, these Renacimientos serve to reclaim and rediscover that history, to make it whole again. Like religious icons they radiate a spiritual completeness. This exhibit connects metaphorically the purpose of the lens in the traditional camera with the artist’s distinctive vision as they imagine through a lens sharply… Alessandra Moctezuma
Curator
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