Absorption + Transmission features large scale prints from two of Mike and Doug Starn’s recent bodies of work, Structure of Thought and Black Pulse.
Born in New Jersey in 1961, identical twins Mike and Doug Starn began working collaboratively as teenagers. They gained widespread recognition when they were featured in the 1987 Whitney Biennial. With large scale Scotch-taped prints attached directly to the walls with push pins, they challenged many of photography’s longstanding traditions. Since then, they have continued to occupy a unique position within contemporary art practices by blurring boundaries between photography, video, installation, sculpture, printmaking, and painting.
Over the past ten years, the Starns have embarked on a metaphorical exploration of light as a requisite for photography and vision, and as a symbol of enlightenment. Their investigations have led them to create the two bodies of work on display in which they feature light as a life force, and draw parallels between the structure of flora and the human body. Structure of Thought includes images of branching trees that resemble the microscopic dendrites of neurons in the brain. Images from Black Pulse, their other series on view, were created by scanning and digitally stripping leaves, layer by layer, to reveal their veins.
The Starns’ work has been exhibited in museums worldwide for two decades with their most ambitious projects realized most recently; in the spring of 2004, the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY) featured Behind Your Eye which coincided with the release of a new monograph entitled Attracted to Light, during the winter of 2004-05 the Färgfabriken Kunsthalle (Stockholm, Sweden) premiered Gravity of Light, an exhibition of photographs illuminated by a single blindingly bright arc lamp. They have received critical acclaim in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, Flashart, and other international publications. Mike and Doug Starn are recipients of two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1987 and 1995). Their work is included in the collections of several major museums, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), and the Museum of Modern Art (NYC).
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Black Pulse 15 © Mike & Doug Starn
Black Pulse (flat) 1, 3, 6, 7, 11, 4, 17, 15, 13 © Mike & Doug Starn
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