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STEPHANIE BURSESE

Changing the Tense is an installation that uses architectural intrusions and photography to experiment with how your body moves through space. The experiment begins as you enter the gallery, where you are confronted with an obstacle. This intrusion modifies how you would normally navigate the space, and asks you to choose to continue or turn back. The work exists largely in this decision, choosing to advance through a barrier, affecting your perception and judgment.

Just beyond this material threshold is a second space containing photographs of building materials, details within urban landscapes, walls and other modifications to city architecture that speak to the moment you just experienced. This more interior, or internal space is sharply separate from the rest of the gallery. Not only does this draw attention to how your body has shifted in physical space, it also suggests that the shift is psychological and that the images you are seeing illustrate that shift in perception.

The title Changing the Tense refers to a phrase artist Christopher Williams uses to explain how his relationship to a photograph, and the spectators, shifts from what was (the past tense of all photographs) to what is (the photographs you are looking at in the exhibition) when you enter the gallery space.

The selection of photographs in the exhibition draws from Belt and Brace, a new body of work containing a series of color photographs conceived in a book that has been published in conjunction with this exhibition.

Installation details from a solo exhibition at Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, PA on view from November 6-29, 2015.