Vesna Pavlović’s Fall and Folds, her second solo exhibition at whitespace gallery, explores institutional archives of recovered slides. The artist collected many of the slides from several art history departments. Recognized for their brilliant color reproduction and groundbreaking presentation capability, photographic slides were fetishized by artists and educators, and widely used by amateurs. Recent years have seen slide technology and the equipment that supported it fall into obsolescence. Meanwhile, the way we share images has become instantaneous. Each image has lost its physicality. Art historian Morna O’Neall writes, “Pavlović’s work asks fundamental questions about how individuals relate to the photographic image and how this relationship changes when it is viewed communally through projection. In so doing, she challenges us to confront the biases that inform the telling of history—whether art history in the classroom or one’s own personal history in the vacation slideshow”.
The slide-related photographs and objects in the Fall and Folds exhibition reflect on the use of specific materials such as fabric in both art history, and the exhibition design. Within the exhibition setting, the materiality of obsolete objects comes forward, through the illumination and transparency of photographic slides.
