INSTRUCTIONS
Stefan Pedersen
February 19th – 22nd 2009
Open Friday – Sunday, 2 – 6 PM
Opening reception February 19th, 5 – 9 PM
The exhibition, INSTRUCTIONS, by Stefan Pedersen draws on a phenomenological investigation of the first popular analogue SLR camera, the Nikon F (1959 – 1972), whereby the artist attends his focus towards the multi-facetted connotations that has been ascribed to the camera as an object of utility, fetish and status.
Pedersen has been interested in the relation between technology, ideology and recollection for some time – with a starting point in travel photography and the colonial gaze, Pedersen examines the ideological constructions and mechanisms that through image technology defines the way we encounter and decipher the world.
With INSTRUCTIONS Pedersen stresses the fact that photography is not just a one-way documentation or -communication; that, by its very presence, the camera impacts on the conditions it aims to (neutrally) document while at the same time channelizing the cultural norms and projections of the photographing subject onto the motif.
This brings us back to where we started: that the camera in itself is a specific material and not just a neutral filter – a material like all other materials that can undergo a phenomenological examination; be investigated, de- and reconstructed.
