Portfolio:

Photographer: Kevin Brown

Welcome to the Museum:

This is a museum for people of exceptional taste…congratulations! It’s also a paragon of paradox: images that might have no home elsewhere are celebrated here. Highly curated but even more curious, the museum seeks the increasingly impossible equilibrium between infinite clicking and responsible curating. Digital photography functioned like unlimited quantitative easing in an economy, creating a giddiness and then a panic. The problematics of proliferation beg the following questions:

1. What does an image mean anymore in a world where everyone is an artist?

2. Who adjudicates taste?

3. Where did I put my keys?

4. Where is Waldo?

5. What would Andy Warhol think of Waldo? of Walden?

The museum becomes one of so many intermediaries, functioning as a prism which refracts an undifferentiated wash of imagery into specific theme-calibrated bandwidths. Of course, the project of building a rainbow is hubristic. The result might be more akin to a poly-chromatic QR-code than a graceful arc in the sky, but ambitious projects are what took us to the moon…and we brought a camera with us on that storied journey, too…for selfies! Photography is not dead! On the contrary! It is more alive than ever! It is hyper-alive, bacterially plural, practically burial or burro depending on your perspective. Does photography bury us in imagery until we slough the visual off without seeing? Or does the genre work tirelessly for us, our beloved beast, stacked high with so much content? Might it be time to slip-loose the saddle of images on the camels and buffalo and oxen of the artistic world and let the photos fall where they may? Let the curators come in and do their forensics! The beasts have been unburdened!

Overview of the Portfolio:

Referendum showcases two decades of work that coalesced and reified into themes of adjacency, non-noteworthiness, the ancilla and the ancillary, detritus, flotsam and jetsom, the decomposition of Styrofoam, a confettied archipelago strewn with the delicate petals of spring. The portfolio collects what might occur to someone as interesting on second-look. Or third. Or fifth. It is about curated seeing. In addition to this brief preface to this portfolio, specifically, please continue reading to familiarize yourself with the function of portfolios, generally, as part of the organizational program of the museum.

The most important things to know about the organization of this museum can be summarized in the following sentences:

This museum is organized into Portfolios which contain multiple Exhibitions. Portfolios can showcase the work of an individual Photographer or may be organized around a theme that is explored by a cohort of Photographers. Each photographic tile in a Portfolio is a link to an Exhibition. Exhibitions may be announced in the scrolling banner on the home page of the Museum.

In addition to the crucial information above, it is helpful to know the following:

Exhibitions may be announced in the scrolling banner on the home page of the Museum. This museum is organized into Portfolios which contain multiple Exhibitions. Portfolios can showcase the work of an individual Photographer or may be organized around a theme that is explored by a cohort of Photographers. Each photographic tile in a Portfolio is a link to an Exhibition.

Finally, and of lesser importance, consider this:

This museum is organized into Portfolios which contain multiple Exhibitions. Portfolios can showcase the work of an individual Photographer or may be organized around a Theme that is explored by a Cohort of Photographers. Each photographic tile in a Portfolio is a link to an Exhibition. Exhibitions may be announced in the scrolling Banner on the Homepage of the Museum. Additionally, Exhibitions may be Revised with an Introduction and links to Essays and other Related Work. Be on the lookout for New and Revised Exhibitions. First impressions are meaningful, but so too is the deepening familiarity that is earned by revisiting and viewing exhibitions again. Poignancy of in image may increase; cohesiveness of a body of work may become more evident; the interleaving of themes that comprise the textural warp and weft of an artist’s output will reveal itself. Even though images themselves are products of the pixel, their collection and curation is definitely a multi-dimensional-tapestry weaving together the psychological and philosophical and aesthetic and creative threads of artists and their images.

About the Photographer:

The word genius is often seen as a peak—a pinnacle…the acme and the azimuth. For this wily artistic bobcat, genius is basecamp. If he had wings, he would fly but he wouldn’t be a fly, necessarily, because he is myopic. And flies have very good vision with all their eyes. Also, he just really wouldn’t want to be a fly. Interesting how the word “pic” is in the word “myopic”. We are pretty confident that you punctuate outside the quotes. Anyway, what the photographer may lack in modesty, he makes up for in immodesty. What an arrogant…rascal! Nowhere near charming or talented enough to pull it off like one of his role models, Muhammad Ali, who truly was a GOAT…greatest of all time…and who could say he was so great and everyone just agreed…anyway, the photographer’s mother met Ali and got his autograph…Ali said, “Make way for the little lady,” and my mom was able to walk through the throng and get his signature. And my dad had a record signed by Elvis. I guess I am kind of the Elvis-Ali of the photographic world, floating like a complex array of butterflies undulating on the melodies of hound dogs in blue suede shoes.