ACRE Projects: Two-person show by Grant Ray and Becket Flannery

Top: Grant W. Ray "Steuben, Wisconsin: Triangulum Constellation"

Bottom: Becket Flannery "Debbies's Ruler"

ACRE Projects

1913 W 17th St

Chicago, IL

Opening:

Sunday, March 13th · 4:00pm - 8:00pm

Mr. Ray continues his experiment-based practice of documenting photographically the pseudo scientific investigations into unexpected forms of communication from unexpected places. For this latest set of photographs, Mr. Ray returns to the wooded rural areas of North America to get closer to an unblemished natural landscape in humorous exploration to locate marks, traces, or signs that could be construed as natures attempt at communication.

Becket Flannery’s exploration began with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan; prior even to the text, a frontispiece depicts the new “artificial man” whose body is the people and whose soul is sovereignty. This cryptic image introduces and also summarizes Hobbes’ thought. The frontispiece was not simply a decoration, it was a way of reconciling political thought with the sensible – i.e. the creation of political vision. Lately, the rupture between vision and thought has been too severe to repair so easily. One of the most recent political manifestos is written by a committee that proclaims itself to be invisible; and what use does the image-driven political simulacrum have for text beyond the purely tactical?

Rather than the strict correlation of image and text, the intention of the collages in Frontispiece is different. Rather than focusing on the loaded image-symbols, those privileged nodes of interpretation, they play with the forms that frame and suggest this referentiality. These cues to the civic still linger, as we are constantly asked to engage with our political images, without being troubled with what they might mean. These text-less frontispieces then imply new ideas and social visions; they are images looking for authors."