Camera Machina

The Robert Lynds Gallery presents the work of Byron Dauncey and Kevin Day. The exhibition Camera Machina explores facets of Dauncey’s diverse creative practice in photography, highlighting his photo-manipulative work in his Cubist Photography, and showcase Day’s series resuscitated algorithms.

In the contemporary age of digital omnipresence, surveillance, and the widespread use of lens-based devices, how does the medium of photography address issues of artistic agency, meaning formation, construction of reality, and representation?

Byron Dauncey’s portraits are the latest works from a photo-cubist series, in which shards of photographs from different times and angles of a singular subject are rebuilt into a kinetic artwork. Dauncey approaches the photo portraits in ways a cubist painter might—playing on time, space, movement, and perspective. Dauncey focuses in on revealing a creative process, exploring alternative perception, and unfolding somebody as they age.

Kevin Day’s series resuscitated algorithms comprises photographic readymades that resulted from the resetting and retrieving of files in a digital camera, where the process of resuscitation left a body of noise on the presumed seamlessness of data. While data functions by virtue of being the underlying invisible form, executed through the operations of algorithms, the series seeks to emphasize the presence of the medium, insisting on a refusal of machinic representation and quantification. The photographs break down into noise as one approaches the work, and the resuscitated data reveals itself as the constituent unit of contemporary image making.