Hi
I’m heading to Chicago to install my upcoming show, An Audience, at DOCUMENT, Chicago, opening on Friday evening.
As a press release, curator Stephanie Cristello wrote a comprehensive and generous text about the work and the show. You can read the whole thing here.
At the conclusion of her text, she wrote about my previous shows at the gallery:
As much as the photographic origins of Rafferty’s work provide a context of how her images are read, the artist’s medium can be seen as exhibition-making itself. Following the artist’s past presentations at the gallery, Dead Jokes (2016), The Laughter (2018), and Views from Somewhere (2021), what can be seen as the subsequent chapter here serves as a continuation of the themes at the core of each project—tracing the ongoing impositions societal systems reign upon women’s bodies. The artist’s viewpoints are inextricably tied to material culture and unfold parallel to our current political landscape, each marked by pivotal moments of mass attention: Rafferty’s first show opening just two days after the Presidential election of Donald Trump, the second surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court Hearing of Brett Cavanaugh, and the third in the wake of the pandemic. Yet, in An Audience, we find ourselves reeling in the uncertainty of a world defined by unlearned lessons. This transitory, ambiguous character finds itself reflected in Rafferty’s audience, a vague and indeterminate assembly of spectators that we look at (as photographs) or through (as material).
I really appreciate the care that Stephanie took with my work in the crafting of the text.
Audience
An audience has a double meaning. It means a group of people watching a show together in space and time or at least in time. Hang on, it's all now diffuse and decentralized because we can be an audience on our own in our homes in our cars in our earbuds. We can be a solo audience around a bunch of people on the street in the subway on a plane in a doctors office.
An audience is also 'to have an audience with' or to speak to - that I think is more of a one-on-one thing.
from online etymology dictionary:
audience (n.)
late 14c., "the act or state of hearing, action or condition of listening," from Old French audience, from Latin audentia "a hearing, listening," from audientum (nominative audiens), present participle of audire "to hear" (from PIE compound *au-dh- "to perceive physically, grasp," from root *au- "to perceive").
The meaning "formal hearing or reception, opportunity of being heard" also is from late 14c.; that of "persons within hearing range, assembly of listeners" is from early 15c. (a member of one might be an audient, 1610s). French audience retains only the older senses. The English sense was transferred by 1855 to "readers of a book," by 1946 to "viewers of television programs." Audience-participation (adj.) is recorded by 1938 in reference to radio.
So in art, performance, and in film we think of the watching but its origins are auditory (duh).
Studio Visit
The titular ‘audience’ is made up of a number of prints each a variation of “An Audience.” Each of these variations are derived from a photographic contact print1 (above) made of the work Glass Figure One – I Don’t Give a Fuck, 2023. In lieu of a flexible film negative, I used a glass one – the work itself.
Since the work is made up of 15 individual panels, the color variations gave way quickly to variation in position of the ‘figure,’ sort of jumbled and puzzled dismembered bodies.
I’ve made dozens of these pictures in chemical black-and-white and color. The glass of the artworks recall glass negatives, glass interactive tablets, and glass lenses. The photographic paper reacts to both transparent and opaque glass, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Further Reading
Two books I read in December and January effected my thinking in the end stages of preparing for this show. They don’t have a direct research relationship with the work, but I’m recommending them below:
Naomi Klein Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Sofia Samatar & Kate Zambreno Tone
A contact print is a photographic image produced from a film, usually a negative, The defining characteristic of a contact print is that the photographic result is made by exposing through the film original onto a light sensitive material pressed tightly to the film. -NPG UK