De-rezzed is currently showing at Harbor Gallery, located at 17-17 Troutman St, #258, Queens, NY 11385 through May 12.
Henry Chung has reprogrammed a paper punch tape machine to print photographs – the images are revealed by the small holes in each strip of paper, which hang on the wall side by side to construct the image. Punch tapes are a cousin of computer punch cards, a technology that was used in the early days of computers, primarily in the 50s and 60s, to encode and save digital programs and data. These technologies were made obsolete by improvements in storage technology – floppy disks, hard drives and now, flash memory. While today’s technology holds much more information and thousands (or millions) of photographs, the images are hidden in the device, and likely to be obsolete, unreadable and useless within decades.
The paper tapes, while primitive by comparison, are likely to last much longer, and in Chung’s artwork, the images are archived to the tapes in a way that we can see. Chung (no relation to author) uses discarded photographs found in flea markets and antique stores – anonymous to him, and forgotten to the world, from the period when punch tape was used. He enhances the images to work well with the tape as a medium – it prints columns of “pixels” on each tape, and they hang slightly loosely on the wall. The strips move subtly with activity in the gallery, and light passing through the holes in the tape is reflected back from the wall to create the light part of the photographs, with shadows behind the tape that make each punched hole unique and dynamic. The people in the photographs presented here – a family, a woman and a man – appear enigmatic to the viewer, identities elusive, lost to history like so much other data from the past, living as memories fading in human minds.
Jennifer Grimyser’s installations of paper effectively blur distinctions of material, original, and reproduction, and the space of the gallery and the space of the images. Using photographs, drawings, photocopies of photographs and photographs of photocopies, the installations create a narrative leading from the viewer in the gallery into the images, and back and forth again.
In “Slingshot Drawing,” a photo of a hand aiming a slingshot sits in on a clipboard hanging on the wall, positioned on the wall so that the slingshot appears aimed at adjacent image of rolls of paper. The largest piece, “Imagined Moments,” arranges dozens of paper elements, in a variety of sizes, textures, shapes and angles, which refer to each other and elements within. Images flow through the piece being inverted, vaporized, abstracted, rolled, crumpled, cut and copied.
Harbor is a recently opened, artist-run gallery in Ridgewood, Queens, just across the border from Bushwick, dedicated to presenting experimental work by emerging artists. For Bushwick Open Studios, they will be presenting a group show featuring painting and photography on the theme of “fractured landscapes.”
