Exhibition: 11.11.11

November 12 – 13, 2011
183

Curatorial Statement
In 1932, seventeen thousand World War One veterans and their supporters gathered on America's front lawn. In a country beset by the Great Depression, the Bonus Army came to petition for veteran entitlements and hold a space for change. At 11:00am on 11.11.11, Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio's Optics Division raised a giant flag on the National Mall and took a photo that evoked the memory of this landmark event seventy-nine years ago. The world's largest Pocket Instamatic, the Liminal Camera is an image-capturing perceptual tool crafted inside a shipping container. The empty container becomes repurposed as an image-capturing device. Its large-scale photographs are both shot from and developed inside the camera body where, from the operators' vantage point, the subject appears to be upside down. From Flag day 6.14.11 until Veterans Day 11.11.11, the Liminal Camera crossed the nation with the American Flag as a subject, shooting in locations that are inextricably woven together. The Liminal Camera strips photography down to its earliest possible moments. The cross-country tour retraces the movement of silver, an essential element in photographic processing, from the Sierra Nevada to Rochester, NY, where the ruins of the Eastman Kodak industry stand. Photography becoming its own subject renders its dynamic into a metaphor for ruin, while physical ruins are set in landscapes that are themselves ruined by the toll of art production. See article in the Strawberry Bulletin, December 2011, volume 1, number 7 https://metabolicstudio-website-media.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/files/f1b2cf3da77e4a2ebabd392b89a0c23b.pdf