News Blog News (General) Ethan Turpin: Stereocollision | exhibit at The California Museum of Photography
| Ethan Turpin: Stereocollision | exhibit at The California Museum of Photography |
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| Thursday, 02 August 2012 09:00 | |||
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ABOUT Ethan Turpin:
Ethan Turpin created his new series, The Gilded Garden, for a recent solo exhibit at The California Museum of Photography, in which he used stereographs form the museum's Keystone-Mast archive to composite new scenes. Assuming the roll of the original Keystone staff writers, he has since written texts to accompany the subtly surreal scenes and their implications. These texts are letterpressed on a new set of twelve stereocards, which Turpin exhibited in an interactive parlor installation at 18th Street Arts in Santa Monica, California this past Spring. He will release a limited edition of The Gilded Garden set, starting at the National Stereoscopic Association 2012 Convention. The artist is available for contact through his website and on Facebook:
http://ethanturpin.com
http://www.facebook.com/ethanturpin
His latest Event: Stereocollision
January 14, 2012 - April 14, 2012 Opening Reception: February 18, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Stereoscopic photographs, which allowed viewers to see the world three-dimensionally by looking at images through a special viewer, were at their peak of popularity during the Second Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Keystone View Company, the largest of the stereoscopic photography companies, dispatched door-to-door salesmen throughout the United States to sell stereo photographs mounted on thick cardstock, espousing their significance as an educational tool and a way to see the world from one's own living room. Millions of stereo cards were sold.
In re-appropriating imagery and combining scenes, Turpin creates new narratives from the historic photographs steeped in twenty-first century meaning. In his original Stereocollision series, "Global Curiosity," Turpin unflinchingly combines images and text from disparate stereo cards in the Keystone View Company's "Tour of the World" set. Where Keystone's world tour was attempting to educate and entertain (within rather imperialistic parameters), Turpin's contemporary stereo cards draw attention to cultural haves and have-nots, making biting social and political commentary while creating surrealistically believable imagery. In "Minor Miracles," Turpin's work takes on a sense of wonderment while exploring humanity's complex relationship with nature through cycles of harmony, destruction, and renewal. In "The Gilded Garden," Turpin considers the twenty-first century consequences of the industrial growth from the Second Industrial Revolution in images that address changing civilization and ecological instability. Special for this exhibition, Turpin installed a series of new stereoscopic images in the museum's 1905 Cail-o-Scope nickel-operated viewer, allowing his work to mix the old and the new seamlessly.
Complementing Turpin's work are images selected from the Keystone-Mast Collection. These photographs range from straightforward historical documents to the images of foreign cultures Keystone promoted as educational (but to the modern viewer may sometimes seem discomfiting). These photographs illustrate some of the material that influences Turpin's work and help to further demonstrate the ways in which his work transcends linear time to compress history and culture in new ways.
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