The Absence of the Subject at Fotofest Houston, TX (Deborah Colton Gallery)
In this first exhibition in Houston since his historic installation at the Rothko Chapel,Michael Somoroff’s latest body of work continues to explore his concerns with the meta-physical foundations of reality. Using video, 3-D animation and classical photography, this new body of work launches an exploration of the “optical unconscious” through the subtraction of subject matter generally assumed to be the center point in a work of art. These works are about the very prerequisites of reality and the layers of creative interaction between the artwork, the artist, the subject/viewer and the layers of interaction between them. By removing the primary subject from August Sander’s important body of photography “People of the Twentieth Century”, arguably one of the most influential collections of photographic portraiture yet produced, Somoroff succeeds in actually bracketing the “life force” of the subjects previously portrayed in Sander’s original portraits. This body of work is a complex inquiry into what the great American sociologist Peter Berger called “the social construction of reality” as seen through the lens of absence.
Click here to see the entire set of Silver Prints