Empire

Sarah Charlesworth Richard Prince Sam Lipp Nick Sullivan Valentina Vaccarella

Curated by Jed Moch in collaboration with Amity NYC

Empire is a residue.

Empire accrues in layers. The monumental and the disposable, the intimate and the broadcast, the mythic and the transactional. The exhibition sifts through familiarity. To look is to participate. To look again is to notice the seams.

Exposing the threads that bind, the works lay bare and borrowed. Images with powers that do not declare but circulate. Empire settles in long after authority withdraws, lingering quietly intact. What remains is not control, but trace.

Empire revisits the groundwork laid by the Pictures Generation, using appropriation as a way to critique image distribution and identity construction in mass media. Charlesworth and Prince represent divergent approaches — the former, presenting a ‘Modern History’ newsprint series as well as a standalone work from her ‘In Photography’ series, foregrounding distortion and manipulation while Prince removes the image from its original context and re-renders a new mediation with a characteristically dystopic twist. The three emerging artists on view — Nicholas Sullivan, Valentina Vaccarella and Sam Lipp — metabolize the themes mined by the Pictures Generation and present new visions of image culture’s enduring grip.

—Jed Moch