STONE /
George
Szepesi |
George Szepesi photographed Venezuelan Pre-Columbian axe heads and printed them at exactly their same size. Szepesi's works in this exhibit consist of both the photographed object and its image: the stone axe head tied with natural twine to its own picture. The actual stone axe heads hang from the pictures like pendulums &emdash;as if they were straightening out some misunderstanding or denouncing some vertical relationship. The vertical relationship may very well be the ontological difference between the thing and its representation. So Szepesi's work is also about art and reality, object and symbol, and the unexpected or predictable relations between the two realms. The beauty of the stone pieces belies the fact that they were once weapons of destruction and war. The actual axe heads &emdash;unlike their fleeting images&emdash; have gravity. Raising the banal to the level of the ideal or the poetic is a recurrent strategy in Szepesi's work. |