Spiral Galaxy MGC 4565

Sarah CharlesworthWW-1981-136507

1981·Gelatin silver print·119.5 × 165.5 cm (47 1/16 × 65 3/16 in.)

Spiral Galaxy MGC 4565 is part of In-Photography, a series that Sarah Charlesworth created in response to the critic Susan Sontag's influential book On Photography (1977). Sontag, in the artist's estimation, wrote from a standpoint outside photography, without engaging the material as well as the representational histories encoded in photographic technologies. Here Charlesworth appropriated a photograph from a scientific magazine and tore it into pieces to emphasize the scale and substance of her source image. She then photographed the collage greatly enlarged, as if to suggest its own dispersal into outer space. Using torn fragments, Charlesworth literalized the big bang theory, while at the same time thoroughly confusing a conventional sense of scale: the "original" image is rendered enormous, while what it portrays remains infinitely smaller than its cosmic subject.

Catalogue

Year: 1981
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 119.5 × 165.5 cm (47 1/16 × 65 3/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Sarah Charlesworth

Artist

Sarah Charlesworth

Photography

A key member of the Pictures Generation, Sarah Charlesworth explores the structures and assumptions that undergird visual production. Her work evolved as she began to notice how “values were being constructed in mass culture that informed the way we think about the world, our possibilities as human beings, how it is to be a woman, how it is to be a man, how it is to be American or a white person or whatever,” as she has said. For her series “Objects of Desire” from the early ‘80s, which plays with the language of advertising, Charlesworth appropriated images of animals, Hollywood gowns, or masks, among other subjects, isolating them from their context and setting them against bright, monochromatic backgrounds.

East Orange, NJ, USA

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