Jeremy Shaw “Tracer Recordings”

The first solo exhibition in Italy of Jeremy Shaw. The works on show conjure the artist’s longstanding interest in altered states and the wide spectrum of their manifestations, from the somatic and behavioral, to the social and scientific. In a practice that employs media ranging from analog photography to multichannel video installations, Shaw seems intent to seek out the slippery quality of any documentary strategy vis-à-vis the “altered” and query its potential to reverberate on and disorient the viewer. Strikingly, all works in the exhibition depict and unleash movement, but make no sound. Wall-to-wall carpeting amplifies their silent presence.

Cathartic Illustrations is a new body of silkscreen works. Archival newspaper images of people engaged in cathartic activities—spiritual, hedonistic, technological—are manipulated in a process of analog reshooting through various effect lenses that visually enhance their presumed altered state, presenting the subjects as further raptured, tripped out of consciousness, psyched, suspended in time. Silkscreen was developed for massive dissemination and imagery derived from the series irreverently covers large sections of the gallery walls. And yet in a further distortion, each Cathartic Illustration is unique.

Also on view is Exorcism in Essex. 15-4-75 (2020) from the Towards Universal Pattern Recognition series. Here, another archival photograph is filtered through a large prism frame designed by the artist. The multi-faceted object focuses directly on the exasperated face of the photos protagonist, visually approximating her apparent altered state with its kaleidoscopic repetitions. As each facet is a lens that reflects multiple refractions, the framing itself, positioned between the image and the viewer, also reflects the factors that inform the production and reception of the image—from the gaze of the photographer, to the perspectives of the camera, to the beliefs and expectations of the viewer themselves.

This Transition Will Never End (2008-ongoing) consists of a sequence of appropriated vortexes—footage taken from low budget movies, cult TV series, and Hollywood classics—cataloging how this phenomenon has been used with surprising consistency to represent a transition between two states, two realities, or a slippage of time. Through a history of special effects employed to illustrate the trope—from physical constructions in The Time Tunnel (1958) to split-screen animation in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), from early computer graphics in Tron (1982) to highly advanced CGI in Enter the Void (2008)—we witness the consolidation of a visual metaphor.