Frank Selby: Candles and Games

Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Candles and Games, a project room exhibition of new work by Frank Selby. This is the artist's first solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery. The show consists of graphite drawings on mylar.

Frank Selby draws from press photographs and film stills. The images often depict social unrest—riots or protests—or the aftermath of natural disasters like hurricanes or volcanic eruptions. A Selby drawing is usually a collage of a pair of images or a single image that has been doubled, spliced, or layered over itself and slightly shifted—somehow altered to emphasize movement, conflict, and confusion.

Selby's work explores misinterpretation and miscommunication. He is interested in how we make meaning out of visual material—especially how the limits of an image's capacity for signification often fall short of what we assume or expect.

Linguistic theorists generally agree images have no inherent meaning. They are merely catalysts for interpretations based on a viewer's personal experiences and knowledge of culture and history. Reading an image is a subjective endeavor.

Photographs are popularly seen as objective records of reality—infallible evidence, truth. But as with all images, photographs—even unmanipulated ones—are unreliable signifiers. Photographs of conflicts and natural disasters are especially gross simplifications of the events and people they depict. Reality is always much messier than what can fit into a single, silent, motionless picture.