Furtive

Filter Photo is pleased to present, Furtive, a photography-based exhibition that explores the complexity of memory, both personal and collective. Through an examination of place, archive, and the intersection of perception and knowing three artists ask us to reconsider what we think we know based on our past experiences, communal knowledge and memories.

Over time, the viewing public has lost the ability to connect emotionally with images, even the most horrific. In her series Interventions, Krista Wortendyke alters images from the public archive by obscuring the parts of the images that define them as historically significant and re-draws the gesture of what lays beneath, compromising the meaning of both the old and the new image. The images are presented as post-card sized to reference the original way many of these images were originally distributed – a time when atrocities such as public lynchings were celebrated in American culture. Through obscuring and re-contextualizing these unsettling images, Wortendyke asks us to refresh and reboot our collective memories and see these images with fresh eyes.

Daniel Hojnacki’s work reflects a fascination with the subjectivity of human perception and the evolution of memory and reality over time. His series Where House Used To Beretells the story of a house he never knew practicing the construction of a memory he never had. The house in question is on Bear Lake, Florida and was once a home to his great grandparents. Their memories via photographs are all Hojnacki has to discern and tell the story of a place ambiguous and fictional to him, and ultimately us.  But like waking from a dream all we are left with are glimpses and fleeting sensations, the furtive nature of memory laid bare.

Karolis Usonis began Quiver as a sort of exorcism when he came across his father's photographic archive of his mandatory army service in Khabarovsk, USSR. Through examining his father’s military archive as well as his archive of family photographs, Usonis found himself identifying with certain gestures as a gay male.  By isolating and re-contextualizing the gestures found in these images into a fictional queer narrative within Gorbachev's ranks Quiverchallenges the post-Soviet homophobia in which Usonis grew up as a question left to fester by the censored liquidation of queer identities found in his father’s Soviet era.  Usonis re-remembers his father’s history as a way to mend his own.

On View: February 2 – April 7, 2019 

Location: Chicago Cultural Center, Michigan Avenue Galleries | 78 East Washington

This exhibition was presented through DCASE’s ArtsSpace in kind grant program and supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.