Beginning with a soft opening and AAM Questrom Lecture Series discussion between exhibiting artist Mario Garcia Torres and exhibition curator/AAM Associate Curator Matthew Thompson at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday May 12, 2011, the Aspen Art Museum presents the group exhibition The Anxiety of Photography. A free public reception will be held at 6:00 p.m., Thursday, June 23, 2011. The exhibition will remain on view through Sunday, July 17, 2011.

Photography can be thought of as a medium, a tool, an object, a practice, or, more often than not, some combination thereof. The fluidity of photography as a medium can produce fundamental anxieties for both artist and viewer. Through approximately 40 works—some created for the exhibition and others shown for the first time—The Anxiety of Photography examines the artistic output of 18 artists who embrace photography’s plasticity and its ability to exist (sometimes uneasily) in multiple contexts. Many of the works in The Anxiety of Photography reflect on the changing nature of our relationship to the materiality of images, as artists produce photographic prints from hand-painted negatives, violently collide framed pictures, arrange photographs and objects in uncanny still lives, or otherwise destabilize the photographic object. Many of the artists included in The Anxiety of Photography—some of whom self-identify as photographers, others for whom photography is central to their work—employ an expanded collage aesthetic and have fully digested notions of appropriation.

The Anxiety of Photography includes work by Colby Bird, Miriam Böhm, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Brendan Fowler, Mario Garcia Torres, Leslie Hewitt, Matt Keegan, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Anthony Pearson, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Erin Shirreff, Matt Saunders, David Benjamin Sherry, Dirk Stewen, Sara VanDerBeek, and Mark Wyse.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensively illustrated catalogue featuring newly commissioned contributions by Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Jenelle Porter, senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The Anxiety of Photography is funded in part by the AAM National Council. General exhibition support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional exhibition support is provided by the Diane and Bruce Halle Fund for Latin American Art.

Exhibition lectures are presented as part of the Questrom Lecture Series.
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