The Body, Color Coded in Kelvin Temperature According to Frequency
of Depiction

source: paper-journal

There has been a growing trend for photographic artists to treat the studio as a space of radical possibility. Of course, this is not entirely without precedent, but there is a widely recognised sense that the prevalence of such work indicates a deeper shift in how we think about photography itself. At the same time, it does a disservice to the worth of an individual artist to say that their approach is the product of some trend. So, even if the work of Joshua Citarella might be thought of in relation to that move toward a self-reflexive, studio-based practice, it is also a set of propositions and concerns expressed using a vocabulary that is all his own. Citarella’s response to this supposedly new state of the medium has not been entirely predicated on a sculptural approach, which has most often been the default means of considering these same issues.

The densely arranged space and persistent references to the means of visual production are all part of an intensely considered exploration into the conceptual boundaries of photography. He makes astute use of several familiar conventions, especially to do with the role of the body in art, as well as the conflation of functional and commercial vocabularies, to address the conditions that must underlie any particular use of photography. Indeed, if the anxiety that surrounds the ‘dematerialised’ photograph has turned many artists back to a formalist restatement of its potential coherence, Citarella seems determined to push on to its breaking point and beyond, almost to a kind of anti-photography. The still life is, here, the play of dissonant relationships, a sort of collage in real space – or, rather, the dimensional space within the picture, because it is, in part, a synthetic reality, held together by the frame. Its ‘reality’ is a telling artifact of the photographic process itself.

It is possible, then, to conclude that this fragmented, unstable space is a summation of the medium containing it: the ‘subject’ is not only what appears in the photograph, but also the ever-shifting condition of that which makes it visible. Citarella concerns himself with the potential of a medium at its limit, where expected consistencies become transformative encounters. His subjects do not operate as signs, as merely the trace of something, but are, in fact, complex material presences – however fugitive the rendering or seemingly partial the manner in which they are seen to exist. Indeed, this condition of relative incompleteness is central to their functioning, as no object exists wholly for itself – and certainly no photographic subject can be understood in this way.

So, in that sense, Citarella’s work is actually not the product of a spurious dualism, where the virtual image, with all of its various lacunae, is opposed to the straight-forward reality that preceded it. Instead, the photograph is seen as being co-extensive with that real space, in so far as it can faithfully recreate the inconsistencies and outright failures that have come to define the visual. A human body often functions as an index for the gap that exists between what is generally perceived as being whole and what little can be known of it based on that faulty understanding. The ways in which we conceptualise such knowledge might otherwise depend on the use of photography as a transfer of information with minimal attenuation, but for Citarella what matters is the ‘shape’ of the medium itself and how this determines our reading of an image. Here, those coded structures are explicitly visible, if perhaps not always comprehensible.
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source: artinamericamagazine
Joshua Citarella is a young New York artist with a particular adeptness at navigating the increasingly blurry divide between the gallery and the Internet. For his first solo exhibition at Higher Pictures, Citarella presented five large-scale C-prints (all 2013) that toy with the often porous boundaries between reality and representation within contemporary image-making. Though Citarella does take the photos that form the basis of his works, his practice gives precedence to Photoshop’s postproduction techniques. He is perhaps best known for his involvement in The Jogging, a popular image-based Tumblr of online-only art, along with the more recent “.PSD Show,” his ongoing online exhibition of downloadable raw Photoshop files.
Paradoxically, Citarella’s background in this dematerialized sphere of online art is exactly what gave his work at Higher Pictures a nuanced sense of materiality. Body Anointed with Nitroglycerin Awaits Transfiguration depicts a reclining female nude daubed with silver and surrounded by shimmering flecks, digital glitches (intentionally and painstakingly placed by Citarella) resulting from the same Photoshop techniques that have been used to render the woman’s body blemish-free. Digital dust seems to have impossibly made its way onto the work’s actual frame, where silver fingerprints suggest a slippage between the radiantly over-perfected image and its material grounding in the gallery.
Citarella is adept enough at image manipulation to make viewers unsure to what extent, if any, the subjects have been digitally altered, propagating a perpetual, willful confusion appropriate to today’s technological shifts that continually reshape the relationship between images and their referents. Immaterial Transmutations of Lead and Gold I makes this apparent with its banally tasteful depiction of a scattering of small rocks set among tree branches stripped of bark, all arranged against a solid white backdrop. The rocks appear to be composed of varying ratios of lead and gold; some are clearly half and half, while others have a gradient between the two elements, as though captured in mid-transformation. The allusion to alchemy in the piece’s title is apt; Citarella’s slick precision suggests that any number of conceivable objects could be conflated, as if by magic.
His images arguably also touch on ideas that have been circulating recently among artists such as Timur Si-Qin and Mark Leckey regarding “techno-animism.” The notion holds that, as our environment is increasingly technologized, it becomes increasingly mystified. The clearest illustration of this is Mainframe Stores Red Channel Data from REM Sleep Beta Waves, a photograph of a minimal and elegant crimson-painted server box against a white wall and concrete floor; the stark, perfected simplicity of the image stands in marked contrast to the utter technological complexity harbored by the server.
For Citarella, objects are sites of dissimulation, never quite what they seem. When taken as a whole, aspects of his solo debut can appear overly oblique, but his work has a refreshing lack of archness that stands in contrast to that of many of his so-called post-Internet contemporaries. Instead, Citarella seems fully committed to the pristine surfaces made possible by modern technology, discovering there a kind of transcendent blankness bordering on the spiritual.
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source: lavalette
Joshua Citarella (b. 1987) is a New York based artist and curator, whose work includes aspects of photography, digital media and sculpture. He is the coordinator of online projects and physical exhibitions including Flatten Image (New York, 2011) and Merge Visible (Chicago, 2012), as well as the continuing online exhibition thePSDshow.org (2012–) featuring works by artists Lucas Blalock, Daniel Everett, John Houck, Kate Steciw, among others. He is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.