Blind Spot: Billie Clarken, Aura Rosenberg, Anastasia Samoylova, Britta Thie

In one set of images, entire cities collapse into surfaces of glass, branding, and repetition. Location survives solely as a caption. In Anastasia Samoylova’s Image Cities, the frame is a form of exclusion, and its casualty the context. Dehumanized by the very images designed to guide its citizens, the anonymous tread lightly into unknown locations.

Elsewhere, fragments of celebrity images circulate with a different kind of insistence. They are familiar without being close. Billie Clarken delivers them to us, as aware as ever that, although already overproduced, they are never quite resolved. To put it in the words of a celebrity culture connoisseur, Courtney Love: “Celebrity is concept art. What is real art is music and film.”

As pop culture permeates our intimate spaces, even bathtubs, it becomes increasingly difficult to switch off. We are constantly being observed by an unseen audience, all the while we are blurring the line between consumption and observation itself. Further along, objects that were never meant to be central begin to look self-sufficient. Meaning tends to accumulate here. Objects, leftovers, stuff positioned just outside the action.

Aura Rosenberg’s series Scene/Obscene plays with this contradiction. The word obscene carries its origin within it. Or so the story goes. Coming from ancient Greek theatre ob skene: what was kept off-stage in the theatre, excluded from the frame of representation. Whether etymology or myth, the image holds. In her paintings of props and objects from pornographic films, Rosenberg drops the pornographic for the obscene.

These very mechanisms are subject matter in the work of Britta Thie. In her paintings, behind-the-scenes machinery of watching, recording, staging become front and center. The invisible is rendered visible, affirming the image as a site of power. They personify the object, the machine; we live with it, and now we’ve lived to see it.