August 2010

Significant Surfaces:

Selections from the ICP Class of 2010

Curated by Marina Berio

"Images are significant surfaces. …This space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. [Images] are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: instead of representing the world, they obscure it until human beings' lives finally become a function of the images they create -- human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world 'out there,' which meanwhile itself becomes like an image - a context of scenes, of states of things."

- Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

All images © Patricia Burmicky

Patricia Burmicky (Venezuela/Slovenia) uses scanning as an immediate, spontaneous, and flexible way to flatten time and experience into digital collages incorporating glimpses of a happy upbringing with occasional details of a more immediate present. Using both the storage containers and contents of her family’s photographic archive as raw material, she creates a visual framework for the contemplation of geographical and temporal distance, family resemblances, and life changes.