Dead Jokes: Document, Chicago

DOCUMENT is pleased to present Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will open on November 11 with a reception from 5pm to 8pm, and will continue through December 23, 2016.

For this exhibition, Rafferty produced a new series of small-scale multimedia photographs using imagery from her own archive. Anonymous female subjects drawn from popular sources comprise one of the series’ motifs. Elsewhere, familiar images generate patterns and formal parallels. A mass of band-aids echoes an image of floor tiles, while a blue noose adds a sense of menace to an otherwise innocuous photograph of a blue necktie.

These digital images are printed on clear plastic sheets, and in some cases the artist has applied polymers that bleed and alter the original image. The majority of the “photographs” are one-of-a-kind, comprised of different types of plastic (film, paint, colored Plexiglas).

While the artist’s connections between consonant images may surprise or disturb, they are never accidental, and indeed reinforce the urgency of each selection and juxtaposition. She thus departs from the “anomic archive” associated with artists like Gerhard Richter, with its meditation on the radical heterogeneity of contemporary photography. Instead, Rafferty’s explorations of the photographic medium, gender, and popular culture correlate specificity with intensity.