Light Work is presenting “One Wall a Web,” featuring the work of Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery at Light Work through Dec. 16. A reception and lecture with Wolukau-Wanambwa will take place on Thursday, Nov. 10, from 5-7 p.m. at Light Work and a gallery talk at 6 p.m. Refreshments will be served at the reception. Also on view is “The Trouble with Flesh: New Work by MFA Candidates” in the Light Work Hallway Gallery.
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Selection from “All My Gone Life” by stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
Wolukau-Wanambwa’s “One Wall a Web” is an exhibition that gathers together work from two discrete photographic series that he made in the United States: “Our Present Invention” (2012–2014) and “All My Gone Life” (2014–2016). Both the series and the exhibition draw their titles from the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser.
“One Wall a Web” not only explores the mutability of archival images, but the ongoing presence of history in the present day. According to Wolukau-Wanambwa, the exhibition attempts to address “the normalcy of fear, separateness and violence in a moment suffused by them, but also in a culture riven by the habitually limited prescriptions of images.” The exhibition comprises two distinct strands of photographs: the first, a series of appropriated archival 4×5-inch negatives; the second, a series of original photographs.
Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer and editor of “The Great Leap Sideways.” He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou and Paul Graham, written for Aperture magazine and is a faculty member in the photography department at SUNY Purchase. Wolukau-Wanambwa participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in May 2015.
