“Anti-Nostalgia”, a group exhibition of artists invited to create works utilizing found photographs, includes the work of Professors Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick and alumna Laura Sharp-Wilson BFA ’87. The exhibition is on view October 4 – 21 at The Carrack in Durham, North Carolina.
In the exhibition, artists explore: our relationship to the photograph as an object; memories and sentimentality; history and the familial; the vernacular and the archive; and alternative and interventionist narratives. A photograph provides both a historical and unattainable reality. “Anti-Nostalgia” investigates how our attraction to and/or repulsion by found photographs does not come from nostalgia, but comes from a desire to confirm, deny and transform a reality. Theorists argue that nostalgia can be a form of fascism – a longing for a glorified past that leads us down an authoritarian path. “Anti-Nostalgia” is a topical and critical approach to our current global situation, an attempt to draw attention to the way we read, feel, understand and use imagery in the name of ideology and personal whim.