PAST EXHIBITION

Don’t Look Back

The 2013 CCNY Staff Show

Featuring:
Halli Bischoff
Alexander Bush
Lindsey Castillo
Jesse Cesario
I-Hsuen Chen
Michael J. Dalton II
Katherine Finkelstein
Ryan Foerster
Gabriel Gutierrez
Kara Hayden
MengLing Hsieh
Tessa Hutchcroft
Neely Johnson
Sarah Anne Wharton Kuhn
Anne Lai
Alexander Lane
Azikiwe Mohammed
Brayden Olson
Car Pelleteri
Alexander Perrelli
John Stanley
Christina Thurston
Sam Williams

Baxter St at CCNY is proud to present Don’t Look Back: The 2013 Baxter St at CCNY Staff Show, curated by I-Hsuen Chen and Alexander Perrelli, an exhibition featuring work from emerging photographers and celebrating each artist’s valuable commitment to supporting Baxter St at CCNY in fulfilling its non-profit mission.

‘The camera therefore is an eye capable of looking forward and backward at the same time. Forward, it does in fact “shoot a picture”, backward, it records a vague shadow, sort of a x-ray of the photographer’s mind, by looking straight through his (or her) eye, to his(or her) bottom of soul.’ — Wim Wenders

Don’t Look Back is an exhibition of works that both peer ahead to the future and long for what has been left behind, emphasizing loss, self-reflection, while hinting at what could be next. Many of the images evoke a melancholic sense of inertia, but others point to the potential of a dramatic transformation. Untitled, 2009, by Christina Thurston, depicts a young girl in a swimming suit, avoiding the camera. The awkward poise of the subject’s gesture suggests a sense of movement and uncertainty. The perspective in Michael J. Dalton II’s photograph entwines subject to photographer, expanding the encounter into complex emotional depths as it plays on the paradoxical ways of interpreting the exhibition’s title. Lindsey Castillo’s zine acts as a stop-motion illustration of the dichotomy of observing – the omniscient narrator offers us a silent, passive witness to the frantic, random movement of urban street life. Don’t Look Back depicts the sensitive relationship of the decisive moment to the lingerings of the past and the potentialities of the future.