ATLAS

The 40 new works produced for “ATLAS, 2014” uses the medium of hardcover books and reconstructs and brings together under one concept, works previously shown in “Misunderstanding Focus, 2012,” “Portrait, 2012,” “Misunderstanding Focus 16:9, 2013,” and “Scene to know, 2013.”

Below is Narhol’s statement about the concept behind the works.

“ATLAS” focuses on the fleeting appearances of “them.” We face the subject and shoot 200 images over several minutes. We print all the images, layer them, and carve into them. We try to approach their appearance, but like water dripping from one’s hand, “they” move farther and farther away from us. It’s as if the more one wrote a story, the more it conjured things that could not be documented in writing.

Is it paradoxical to distort and cut up their images, when we want to capture their essence? When we think about it, the society we live in drives many things into obsolescence with great speed. It’s almost as if that was the only way to remember reality.

When a story is contained in a book, it becomes portable and sharable. The book also allowed for rewriting and caused the inevitable loss of the original. We transcribe “their” appearance and carve into them as if to travel back in time, which accumulated in layers. We then bind those images as pages are bound in a book and insert them into the continuity of phenomena and an environment, which waits for its gradual disappearance. We hope that “their” appearances, which are distorted in the bound book, destabilize the targets of capitalist economy.