Claude Closky, Journal

PLAN B, a curatorial space
November 2 to January 7
Curator: Joseph del Pesco

Opening Reception and Curator's Talk
Thursday, November 2, 7 p.m.

Writing is an interpretive act where memory fragments from past experience are translated into a textual record, forming a personal statement. However, as American theorist Susan Sontag noted, images and recorded audio “do not seem to be [interpretive] statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” Yet despite their apparently stable representational value, when sound and image are used in combination each can radically inflect the reading of the other.

In Claude Closky’s media work, Journal, conversations between image and sound awaken our interpretive faculties as sound informs our reading of the images. The pairings simultaneously emphasize the power of the media on view and, by accumulation, remind us of the numbing effects of its mass proliferation. Like a streaming news aggregate, we sit back and experience the world washing over us.