Augment This (Meditations on the Image): Jennifer Boysen, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Gary Hill, Tobias Kaspar, Susanne Kriemann, Pat O'Neill, Anna Ostoya, and Mandla Reuter

Christopher Eamon writes, "The exhibition Augment This is staged in the context of an eclectic contemporary art landscape that offers renewed interest in almost all ‘isms’ of the past: from early Modern abstraction to all kinds of figuration and variants on language and photo-based conceptualisms. At the same time, image-based culture at large continues to produce technological solutions to perceived “problems” with the visual in contemporary culture. As if to call out the inadequacies of visual reality, symptoms of a sweeping visual malaise are seen as remediated by continuous visual stimulation, speed and augmentation. What is often referred to as the current generation’s need for speed has spurred new and renewed entertainments such as technologically new, but conceptually passé, 3D movies, video games and television screens. Such consumer ‘technologies of the perception’ continue to proliferate as both responses to, and agents of, the truism that customers not only want, they need, ever more visual augmentation.

'Augment This' draws attention to aspects of contemporary art that may be neither technologically advanced nor necessarily representational in the strictest sense. But, while the exhibition aims to resist the above mentioned technological-consumer model of visual stimulation, it also foregrounds it, for instance, through the work of Tobias Kaspar’s HD video 'Black Noirewhich' fixates on the surfaces of contemporary luxury merchandizing, or in Mandla Reuter’s 35mm film loop entitled 'The Shell,' in which the artist meditates on an ersatz cornice detail found in Las Vegas filmed in astonishing Technicolor. It also pays deference to a tenant of phenomenology announced in the title of a 1971 Stan Brahkage film 'The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes,' where images of cadavers filmed in the Philadelphia Public Morgue express a kind of power, the likes of which, only the human eye can be said to mark a trace. And finally, in the work of Susanne Kriemann, where her photography is produced by the unseen—having been made by exposing film to radioactive rocks from Texas.

While 'Augment This' is meant to focus one’s capacity for visual communication, it does not rest entirely on a phenomenological creed that fuses form with perceived phenomenon. Instead works in this exhibition call, in differing ways, for the slowing down of the spectator and a return to the visual, the basis for which is inherent in human perception, its technologies (the lens of the eye, its binocular vision) and a preponderance for translation (classification systems, storage and memory). The exhibition includes artists Jennifer Boysen, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Gary Hill, Tobias Kaspar, Susanne Kriemann, Pat O’Neill, Anna Ostoya and Mandla Reuter."

Christopher Eamon is a New York-based independent curator and writer who has curated exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally including at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin; MoMA PS1; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Aspen Art Museum, and other major institutions. In 2011 he curated Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, which originated at The Power Plant, Toronto, and toured to the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. Eamon’s publications include Anthony McCall: the Solid Light Films and Related Works (Northwestern University Press and Steidl, 2005). His writings on film and video art from 1950 to 1980 appear in Film and Video Art (Tate Publishing, 2009) and he is the coeditor, with Stan Douglas, of Art of Projection (Hatje Cantz, 2009), an anthology on the history and significance of projected images from the eighteenth century to the present. Eamon was the former curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, former executive director of the New Art Trust, and a former assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.