The Absence of the Subject
March 1st, 2008
The Absence of the SubjectFollowing his installation at the Rothko Chapel and his recent solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum, Michael Somoroff’s latest body of work continues to explore his concern with the meta-physical foundations of reality.
With his exhibition The Absence of the Subject, Michael Somoroff creates a new series based on the seminal body of photographic work by German Photographer August Sander (born 1876). Sander documented the populace of Weimar Germany to show niches in a caste system of a supposedly democratic and freethinking republic.
Using video installation, 3-D animation, and classical photography, this body of work is a complex inquiry into what the American sociologist Peter Berger calls “the social construction of reality”.
With the gesture of removing the subjects from August Sander’s haunting and political body of portraiture, Somoroff illuminates the context of the lives, or “life force” of the subjects portrayed in Sander’s portraits, thus catalyzing the perceptual essence of mortality and its relationship to the history of photography.
This illuminated context then becomes the new subject and we are led to into the “optical unconscious” of Walter Benjamin (German philosopher, born 1892). The former portraits become landscapes, still lives and sublime voids within which the viewer can partake in a new journey. The resulting effect is often the unsettling feeling of wonderment and isolation, fundamental components in our collective desire for community.
Entry Filed under: Installation, Prints