The new index of light | Irene Mamiye
March 19, 2020 – September 9, 2020
Crossing Art is pleased to announce The New Index of Light, a solo exhibition featuring the work from artist Irene Mamiye’s Homage, Cipher, and Collapse series. The show takes its title, The New Index of Light, from the roots of the word “photograph” itself: photos meaning “light” and graphe meaning “representation, drawing together” in the Ancient Greek. Roughly translated, the photograph is a means of drawing with light, and Mamiye’s work presents a contemporary context, or “new index”, for those infinitely possible representations.
Mamiye’s training in traditional photography serves as a foundation for her diverse output of recent works, marking their singularity of vision that sustains the works’ manifold material realities. Each series demonstrates an artistic impulse to formally and conceptually experiment with multiple forms of media. including photography, print, video, sculpture, and VR. Working from the level of the pixel to the scale of the billboard, her acrylic wall sculptures, lenticular murals, and collages on canvas, aluminum, and in VR environments all come from the same impulse: a compulsion to rescue, reconstruct, or return the refuse of today’s image environment to a yet unrealized representation of their essential being. This implies a kind of a priori relationship between the eye and the beholder, the lens and the photographer; putting Mamiye’s practice at the end of a long tradition that once organized space into landscape and today, causes code to materialize into the portals that let us into our screens.