David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present This Synthetic Moment, curated by David Hartt, on view January 18 through March 10, 2018.

A picture of one woman looking at another, a portrait
of a man holding a camera, a portrait of several
women in a schoolyard, a picture of a dancer
recumbent, and a picture of several ships.

A crisis of borders, a fold in time, a rupture in space.
An assertion of gradience.

I was having a hard time describing how I was feeling
and then Thomas said “synthetic” and it stuck in my
mind. I wanted something porous, a polymeric
structure where the voice, agency, geography, and
temporality of others collude to produce a
more compelling version of the world. Brixton, Los
Angeles, Accra, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, etc., spinning a
new distributed off-axis center.

I was having a hard time describing what I was
seeing. So I'll show you instead. Pictures of power
and pride and grief and desire and confusion and
community and celebration and abandonment and of
a wandering itinerant solitude.

I want to hold all of these things together in
this synthetic moment.

The exhibition brings together a disparate group of
artists who use photography almost as a will to power,
an assertion of their own positionality. A compound
description of the world as vast and contingent. -
- David Hartt, 2017