Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture

Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture spotlights evolving attitudes toward the appropriation, recuperation, and repurposing of extant photographic imagery.

Such processes are not unique to the twenty-first century, however. Whether Dada collages or Pop Art silkscreens, “The activity of image transfer has been with us throughout art history,” observes curator Sara Krajewski. Yet today, she adds, “strategies of redirecting, recombining in, repurposing, and remixing loaded visual materials pervade the creative field.”

Artists, as both producers and consumers in today’s vast image economy, freely adopt and adapt materials from myriad sources so that imagery culled from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, television, films, personal and public archives, studio walls, and from other works of art are all fair game. Image Transfer brings together twelve artists who divert commonplace, even ubiquitous visual materials into new territories of formal and idiomatic expression.

This exhibition proposes that these artists mark the progression of intuitive practices that are thoroughly at ease with today’s hyper-fluid circulation of images. In our digital age of fair use and open source, these attitudes demonstrate how far traditional notions of the authority and primacy of source materials have shifted toward a fluent rethinking of the way we value and interact with images.

Image Transfer explores several questions. How are artists using clipped, copied, grabbed, or downloaded images, and what do such artistic positions relate to the viewer vis-à-vis the work? How do such synthesized images operate in visual culture? Do these works critique our media-saturated age or are they only symptomatic of it? What can these processes and these composite images tell us about the state of photography today?

Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture is a traveling exhibition co-organized by the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and circulated by ICI. Core funding for the exhibition is provided by The Boeing Company, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, ArtsFund, 4Culture/King County Lodging Tax, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Support to ICI for the exhibition and tour is provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the ICI Board of Trustees, and ICI Benefactors Barbara and John Robinson.