THE TRANSPARENCY OF EVIL, 2017
Exhibition documentation for THE TRANSPARENCY OF EVIL, an exhibition with Kate Hampel at South of the Tracks Projects in Chicago IL.
Exhibition essay by Scott J Hunter:
Humans have always relied on violence as a means of exerting control and taking power. As society has grown more facile at providing a range of new alternatives to war and aggression, progress in technology has fostered opportunities for keeping daily markers of our frailty and discomfort at a distance, allowing the perception that our efforts at community and nation building are situated in the foreground, apart from the violence and trauma that are still commonplace. And yet, as technology becomes more personal and is constantly at hand, there is an intersection of the images, sounds, and detailed information of death that is slowly overtaking us, as it occurs repeatedly outside of our periphery, yet constantly seeks our gaze. Our attention shifts among multiple sources of input that seduce and impinge, altering our sense of what is meaningful and personal, and what is able to be isolated and ignored.
The images we are confronted by are vast in their intersecting range of content, and are readily accessible to us, offered in a stream of constant information devoid of context, that vacillates between political strife, suicide bombings, profiles of media darlings, and the creation of a fictional reality based on access and cowardice. We become spectators, culling certainties from fantasy, and these misinterpretations challenge our capacity to distinguish fact from entertainment. The atrocities we come to witness, that we search for to confirm our increasingly displaced biases, intertwine with the cinematic narratives that are readily produced and intermixed online.
Trauma among atrocity sits for so many, across the world, as a commonplace experience, despite our myriad efforts to seek assurance that we are secure. And over time, trauma has moved from foreground to a droning background, permeating our consciousness and situating deeply in our memory. As such, when we encounter these intermixed images of trauma, daily, across all aspects of social and news media, we effort to disown our discomfort and fear, by situating these diminishments as signifiers of the other, and celebrate instead our capacity to place them outside ourselves. As disruptions momentarily in our conscious lives.
In THE TRANSPARENCY OF EVIL, Ivan LOZANO and Kate Hampel engage us in the processes we implement psychologically, to manage the intersection of media and reality. Their works in this exhibition guide us to make sense of our role as spectator amid the confluence of atrocity and trauma that is projected, and to challenge the denials we allow to take place, at the hands of those manipulating media to gain power and control. Through images culled from blogs and videos posted by and about terror, the Narco murders in Mexico and the Islamist terrorist purges of those deemed infidel, LOZANO and Hampel direct our attention to these sources of communication that feed the streams of information we consume, to address directly the manipulations that they allow.
LOZANO, through exploration of the visual representations of Narco aggressions that daily impact the lives of Mexicans, and the failures of societal structures to reduce and contain this violence, has come to view the landscape as one readily intersected by death, as everyday realities merge with the technological representations that fill our screens. Images obtained from widely viewed public documentation of these murders and maimings, on Narco blogs and social media threads, are taken as signifiers of the mundanity of these killings, as textures framing and filtering our awareness in our easily distanced urban lives. LOZANO confronts the processes by which we effort to avoid discomfort; by situating images of violence within a visual transcription of beauty, he guides us from a preferential position of denial, to one that is directly interfered with, both cognitively and psychologically. We experience these works as a rupture of our naiveté, with a resulting alteration of our neural responses to the digital stream. The landscape, its beauty, becomes permanently altered by the recognition of these consequences of aggression and retribution. And our complicity, through our efforts to again avoid, is set in place.
Hampel, in her research into the spectatorship of atrocity, highlights an unsettling recognition about whom and what we are. She captures our vulnerability to the spectacle of death and defines our resulting culpability in these expressions of position and power, as we situate as viewers guided to witness and then resist these acts of violence as anomalies. By considering the deaths of young men at the hands of Islamist terrorists, like James Foley, as they are filmed and released digitally to communicate abject power over life, Hampel confronts us with how the advantages of media become complicit, both consciously and unconsciously, with our understanding of power sought through actions of revenge and dominance. Landscapes emerge in images of dunes and grass, and their accompanying sense of both familiarity place and the unknown, evoke in us simultaneously discomfort and arousal. We seek, with Hampel, to mitigate this disruption that emerges as the images activate our memories of atrocity, but we are reminded, given the intertwining of comfort and fear, of our own capacities for jealousy, aggression, and denial.
Settings are of key importance for Hampel and LOZANO, and their emphasis on the land where we are confronted with such atrocities becomes visually disruptive and unsettling. Our memories of the beauty of these lands are challenged by what is so easily possible, the quick, effortless removal of life. Drained of empathy and strained by our efforts at managing the anxiety this leaves in place, we fall ready victims to the manipulations media can afford. LOZANO and Hampel confront us with the reality that we are surrounded by the capacity for substantial evil, even among the calm and quiet that is our effort to define safety. The twinning of varied imagery, of atrocity among this fantasized security, sits as a constant within our visual lives, altering us psychologically. We are spectators, even as this serves to potentially diminish us, as we fail to confront what is situated within the banal.