Review

"Untitled 03," Archival Ink Jet Print.

Alex Lovell-Smith
In[Sight]: A Retrospective of the work of Alex Lovell-Smith

Noon-8 p.m.

Mercy Seat Gallery
210 E. 16th St.
Kansas City, MO
816.421.4833

Hours: Noon-8 p.m. daily
Runs through: March 31.

Gallery site: http://www.mercyseattattoo.com

There's a pointy-ended football game going on today (as opposed to a real football game, in which more than two players per team actually use their feet to make intentional contact with the ball). It's rather an important game, so much so that its very name is trademarked.

(Planning on watching? Super. Bowl yourself over. But it's okay to go see art first.)

Point is, there will be still photographers at this game, recording the highlights and the low points, the key plays and the emotional reactions. Those shots become part of the history not only of this game, but also of American pointy-ended football as a whole.

The photos aren't the event, though. They're small pieces of it, preserved, conveying partial information in only one of the five senses.

That's the philosophy behind Alex Lovell-Smith's Dream State series and Two Twenty Four photo project, from which he drew key images for his retrospective show, In[Sight], at the Mercy Seat Gallery. (Untitled 03, today's featured image, is from Dream State.)

The photographic image offers the viewer a slice, a frozen moment of the real, delivered to us as a tangible object, something that can be held in our hand, attached to a wall or stuck in a book, Lovell-Smith writes. However, the event depicted by the image is something that does not exist in that same time or space as the photographic print itself. These two projects are an exploration of this relationship between a place or an event and the photographs produced in feedback to these. All of these images are designed to draw in the viewer; to make them question their ideas about reality within the photographic frame and the long held perceptions of the photograph as an indexical signifier of truth.

That more than makes sense. After all, what can a viewer really know about what's going on in Untitled 03? All we're given is one figure, lit from above, free-falling within and deeper into a black abyss (a common theme in dreams). What's the larger context? Where was the shot taken? What were the sounds like? Was the air warm or cold? What didn't make it into the photo?

There are those who know all the sensory information:  Lovell-Smith and his model, obviously, and anyone else who was there when the photo was taken. But as for the full picture, with all of its details filled in by emotion and perception ... well, that's going to be different for everyone involved.

There's more context available, of course, in imagery from today's big game. We have televised images and post-game interviews to provide that. Those seeing the game in person will have yet more information available ... and those playing the game will have still more.

But as Lovell-Smith's work demonstrates, no camera is ever able to capture the Big Picture.