“A photograph could also be described as a quotation, making a book of photographs like a book of quotations.” —Susan Sontag

Murray Guy is very pleased to present “Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic,” curated by Moyra Davey and Zoe Leonard. Exploring various intersections between photography and writing, the exhibition is presented alongside the release of Blind Spot magazine No. 43, which has been jointly edited by Davey and Leonard. The show brings together works by Josh Brand, Roy Colmer, Pradeep Dalal, Shannon Ebner, Joy Episalla, William Gedney, Roni Horn, Katherine Hubbard, Babette Mangolte, Mark Morrisroe, Adrian Piper, Claire Pentecost, James Welling, and David Wojnarowicz.

Taking as its title a line from the journals of David Wojnarowicz, this exhibition proposes a closeness of camera and notebook, assembling works that embody a range of relationships between photography and activities of reading, writing, and note-taking. In contrast to a certain iconoclastic tradition often associated with conceptual art—one which pairs texts with photographs in order to fragment or unhinge the image, to point to its insufficiency or artificiality—the affiliations here could best be described as symbiotic. (Symbiosis: the intimate living together of two dissimilar organisms in a mutually beneficial relationship.) Many of the assembled works propose an interchangeability or fluency between image and text that seems at once to anticipate (in the case of the older works) and to respond to (for those more recent) today’s proliferating digital interfaces, in which images are increasingly embedded within texts, and texts inscribed within the spaces of an image.

Many of the artists in the exhibition, for instance Wojnarowicz, Roni Horn, or Mark Morrisroe, write on the image or in the margins of the image, taking the photographic surface for a notepad, while others, such as James Welling and Shannon Ebner, photograph notebooks themselves (both full and empty, written upon and held in potential.) Artists such as William Gedney, Roy Colmer, and Pradeep Dalal treat photographs as though they were entries in a journal (photographing, perhaps, as a mode of keeping a diary), while Babette Mangolte and Joy Episalla photograph bookshelves, which give external form to internalized activities of reading and writing. Many of these artists (for example Josh Brand) use the camera itself as though it were a writing instrument, evoking the original sense of photography: writing with light.

For more information or images, please contact the gallery at 212-463-7372 or info@murrayguy.com. To order or subscribe to Blind Spot, go to www.blindspot.com.