Systematic Thinking was an exhibition I co-curated with Yechen Zhao at the Yale University Art Gallery, where it was on view from February to June 2023. We brought together works of photography from the gallery’s permanent collection to explore photography’s relationship to systems of order, categorization, and knowledge-making.
Exhibit Description: Photographers have long used their medium to organize their thoughts and the world around them—to categorize and sort both concrete objects and abstract concepts. This installation presents works that speak to photography’s ability to engage with systematic thinking. Mel Bochner’s ordered array of diagrams and block structures, for example, brings photography into dialogue with mathematics, imitating how the latter functions simultaneously as a tool of empirical measurement and a language of symbolic representation. Meanwhile, employing a computer-driven system to pose questions about authority and authorship, Sherrie Levine digitally pixelates the work of her canonical male predecessors. Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe collage nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape images with their own contemporary photographs of the same sites to reflect on how historical presentation of the land can condition our experience of the environment today. Other artists question the conventions of portraiture, examining how the genre serves to construct identity or the expectation that it can capture a singular moment in time. Finally, through their experimentation with seriality and montage, Sophie Calle, Adrian Piper, and Ed Ruscha demonstrate how photobooks can be used to sort reality into categories like narrative and evidence.
