Bonner Road Gallery opens its 2024–25 season with a group exhibition entitled 'Before and After'. Organised by curator Alfie Lofthouse, it includes the works of Sherrie Levine, John Stezaker, and collaborators Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel.
Bonner Road Gallery opens its 2024–25 season with a group exhibition entitled 'Before and After'. Organised by curator Alfie Lofthouse, it includes the works of Sherrie Levine, John Stezaker, and collaborators Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel.
Organised by curator Alfie Lofthouse, Before and After includes the works of Sherrie Levine, John Stezaker, and collaborators Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. Their work attends to the various histories, theories, and strategies in and of postmodern photo practice thoroughly discussed in the catalogue essay written by Lofthouse. The four artists in the exhibition share a common interest in the before and after of the photographic moment, and the relationship between vision and knowledge.
While the four artists in the show have certain similar concerns with histories and theories of photography and the function of the image, they are each working in different media, and generating pictures that are clearly unique in their motivation. Levine’s photographs reproduce the work of other artists, critiquing those works and the concepts of originality, authenticity, and singularity; Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s selection of photographs from industrial, scientific, governmental, and other institutional sources exhibits a brilliant sensibility for the absurd and a keen awareness of the complexity that the single image possesses when viewed outside its original context; John Stezaker’s collages disrupt existing narratives within images to invent new disjointed, dreamlike scenarios through repetition, fragmentation, and superimposition. These artists represent a larger movement to re-examine the relationship between vision and knowledge, repetition and difference, and the concept of before and after, both in photography and the art world in general.
In the organisation of this exhibition, Lofthouse has assumed the functions of the dealer, the curator, the critic—everything but the creative artist.