黑料不打烊

Microscope Gallery is pleased to host All Texts About Love, an exhibition of the work created by the 2022 graduates of the RISD MFA Photography Program.

The exhibition title, All Texts About Love, is an incomplete, open-ended declaration. It is also the title of a video by Ali Newhard, sourced from Roland Barthes鈥� 1977 work, A Lover鈥檚 Discourse: Fragments. Throughout A Lover鈥檚 Discourse, Barthes is consumed with sentimentality. At a loss, he writes himself into a whirlpool of words looking to capture the unmanageable, continually contending with the fact that something so common鈥搇ove鈥揷an still escape being fixed in language. In writing about the book, Wayne Koestenbaum describes Barthes鈥檚 method as 鈥淏anish the message. Preserve the exaltation that surrounds it. Investigate the perfume that the message leaves behind.鈥�

Similarly, the seven artists here鈥搕hrough archival explorations, performative gestures, captured intimacies, ghostly histories, landscapes and forces beyond containment, or the tangles of storytelling鈥搖se the ubiquity of images to trace the perfumes that photography leaves behind. These works visibly strain the received political, racial, gendered, sexual, historical, and environmental narratives that trouble the camera鈥檚 mechanical capture. Theirs are power dynamics that refuse easy resolution. In this irresolution time and causality double back and splinter. Here we are offered seven views into the way we struggle to catalog, reaffirm, append, extend, recut, identify, undermine, shirk, fawn, play, kink, jostle, and recode before the lens.