Curious Devices is a newly-released series of photographs by Brooklyn artist Jeanette May, which continues her exploration of beautifully designed vintage technology. The technological tableaus span antique stereoscopes and art deco clocks to Bluetooth headphones. Each object’s style, color, and material construction epitomize a period of both aesthetic and technological advancement. Surrounded by rich silks and damask wall covering, her still life arrangements suggest 17th century Dutch vanitas, and exploding with a sophisticated use of color.

 

Barcelona-based artist Max de Esteban’s Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral, turns our attention to technology specifically utilized in the creation and dissemination of art. Through a meticulous process, he dis-assembles each apparatus, paints the various parts white, and reassembles the machines—photographing them at each stage of being re-built. The photographed layers are themselves assembled into a single image, resulting in x-ray-like photographs that are reminiscent of architectural cyanotypes.

 

The Nostalgia Technika project by guest artist, Rebecca Hackemann from Kansas City, consists of camera-less wet collodion photograms on metal, referencing cultural and personal nostalgia for lost technologies, centered around cultural tropes such as the homemade mixed cassette tape, the vinyl single, projected home movies etc. The artist uses an even older technical process to talk about a younger defunct technology. The photograms present the objects 1:1, reiterating their direct indexical link to the object imaged.

 

The exhibition brings together three artists, working with very different processes of photographing, but connected through their reverence for technological artifacts. One might describe them as performing a technological taxidermy, performing the role of memento mori for machines that have become obsolete and may soon be forgotten.

Curious Devices & Other Objects