“Out of Context” by Michael Prais | Photographic Performance GalleryTalk
The Photographic Performance was created to feature the works of artist with completed bodies of work and a strong narrative. Michael Prais’ exhibition “Out of Context“ is the first of four performances to be exhibited during 2024. Michael’s exhibition is discussed in this GalleryTalk.
Artist Statement
The reassembly of the photographs figuratively illustrates that photographs are immediately and forever taken out of context. As much as resemblance is heralded as reality, photographs are disconnected from the reality that we take them to be. Reassembly challenges viewers to consider photographs without the resemblance and the composition that are central to the Modernist conception of photography. Reassembly is digital post-processing that challenges Modernist values by producing a self-collage that signals, as collages did a century ago, an expected, disturbing reality and by producing an (oxymoronic) non-representational photograph.
Photographs of scenes with arrangements of deteriorating objects are reassembled to ask viewers to consider how photographs function without their chief characteristic: resemblance. Reassembling photographs takes constituent blocks out of context while each and every piece of the photograph remains visible and each piece–and the whole–remains a photograph. Repetition of the frame repeatedly illustrates that photographs are taken out of context.
Loss of context of any block creates graphical discontinuities at each of its edges that point to precipitous loss after a finite length, time, or life. These rectangles are metaphors for our finite lives. As the original structure is hidden in and by the overall chaotic appearance of the distorted image, this treatment suggests a loss of usefulness and value and perhaps our progression away from a more structured life and toward chaos.
Reassembly could be pushed to the level of pixels to create chaos, but small regions of each photographs remain recognizable so that one can recognize the deterioration and loss captured in my first type of photograph. Abandoned and deteriorating objects in these photographs and the reassembled photographs of them are also metaphors for our lives. I believe that I will not have an afterlife. This project helps me, and perhaps viewers, deal with our ultimate concern.
Michael Prais, 2023
Bio
Michael G. Prais grew up in suburban Dearborn, Michigan, (the home of the Ford Motor Company) during the post-WWII heyday of the auto industry. He studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago and received a doctorate from UCSD analyzing the distribution of vibrations in mathematical models of the surfaces of crystals.
While teaching chemistry and becoming tenured at Roosevelt University in Chicago, his background in teaching and in large-scale calculations drew him into supporting modern information and communication technologies in the service of education.
As a visual person who moved easily between the concrete and the abstract, Michael has always been interested in how both concrete and abstract tools worked. He is particularly interested in explanation and mechanism. He has always helped and taught others to understand and use abstract tools. He has published the book Photographic Exposure and Camera Operation (ISBN 978-1-4392-0641-6).
A visual explorer, he has always been stimulated by the juxtaposition of the organic and the designed and explores both human constructions in nature and nature and the coincidental in the midst of structure. Michael now uses photography to examine how random acts create structure. His current project, Out of Context, examines the concepts of resemblance, reassembly and recognition in photography and the concept that all photographs are taken out of context in an upcoming book of images and ideas.
Directors’ Statement
Michael Prais was selected as one of the four winners in our “Photographic Performance” call for entry. The combination of his Artist statement and images was immediately compelling to us. The deconstruction of the images, illuminated and quickened by the explanation of his intention, gave absolute voice to the constant admonition in our calls, “Creativity Is Encouraged.”
The combination of the psychological and the technical nudges and cajoles various responses from us, the viewer. His images are like metaphorical train wrecks, we can’t look away.
We thank Michael for inviting us into his world.
Amanda Smith and Kevin Tully
March, 2024
website: michaelprais.me
instagram: @michaelprais
