Wolfgang’s Slideshow

Artists who trade in found items often get lucky: An old photographic slide can decompose just so, producing a beautifully decayed image when printed. Berlin-based artist Wolfgang Ganter doesn’t leave it up to the elements. As a student working with recycled materials, he often came across old slides in the course of his scavenging. Intrigued, he decided to mess with them chemically, dipping them into emulsions, wiping them with toxic fluids. Then he made them into prints – big, three-feet-by-five feet prints. The results are striking: Some have ethereal, mysterious bands of color like something out of a William Blake drawing; others feature strange portals and otherworldly snakes. Most of the images in his solo exhibit “Fluke,” though, are blasted with an otherworldly violence, with bubbly, noxious atmospheres transferring new, vicious narratives on the mundane activities in the originals. A boat is lodged in a bubble catching fire as beach goers placidly look on; a cityscape is blurred by a smoky Armageddon; a cabinet in a room breaks apart, caught by an explosion that would have surely killed the photographer.
Nov. 22-Jan. 3, 2008