ABELARDO MORELL COURTESY OF THE NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART
WHERE YOU WANT TO BE IN NOVEMBER
November
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GO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak St., KCMO. Free. Through April 25, 2022.
FILM AT 11
We live in the golden age of photographic manipulation—you’d be hard-pressed to click two links online without coming across an image that’s “shopped” to amuse, inform or misinform. So perhaps it’s natural that high-end illusory imagery gets the gallery treatment at the Nelson-Atkins with Art of Illusion: Photography and Perceptual Play. The show was curated by April Watson, who culled fifty photographs from the museum’s permanent collection, including some recent acquisitions that have never before been on view. The exhibition opened in late October and runs through April 25 of next year. Most of the photos were taken within the past fifty years, and some are combined with painting, drawing or sculpture. (There are no Spongebob
memes.) Other photos were manipulated with the controls of the camera to create oddities in space, scale or distance. Most of the pieces were created using the lens and film, without darkroom trickery or Photoshop. “It is great fun to view these works up close, to try to figure out how these photographs were made and decipher what the artists are trying to convey about photography and its relationship to physical reality,” says Watson. “Many of these photographers have a wry and witty sense of humor.” Among the pieces is Cuban-born American photographer Abelardo Morell’s disorienting and dreamlike Camera Obscura Image of Manhattan View Looking South in Large Room. For the photo, captured in 1996, Morell made a room into an old-timey camera obscura, covering the windows with dark plastic and poking a small hole to make an aperture that projected a reverse image of the outdoors on the opposite wall.”
KANSASCITYMAG.COM NOVEMBER 2021
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