The camera's blind spot

The Camera's Blind Spot is an exhibition focusing on the relationship between sculpture and photography as seen from the standpoint of a dozen of international artists, mostly born after 1970. As such, the show is (ambitiously) meant to be a possible supplement to the remarkable, yet largely incomplete, exhibition of the MoMA The Original Copy. Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (2010). The approach to the topic matter, though, is notably different from the American exhibition's. The latter, as the title stated, restrained itself mainly to a "classic" idea of the sculpture-photography nexus, according to which photography documents and revisits already existing three-dimensional works; a formula that was born with photography itself, and underwent an extraordinary creative turn when sculptors like Medardo Rosso and Costantin Brancusi began photographing their own works in changing light and spatial conditions between the end of XIX and the beginning of XX century. The Camera's Blind Spot aims not only at documenting the latest developments in this trend but also at giving an account of other possibilities, no less important today: for instance, pushing the materiality of the photographic image so far as to turn it into a sculpture in its own right, be it still made of photographic paper or "weighted down" by materials such as wood, metal, concrete. A challenge to what constitutes since the beginning the "blind spot" of photographic technique, its limit: the impossibility to render a three-dimensional object on a plane surface.
Not only an exhibition of framed prints, therefore, but a wholly different project, that will include wallpapers, installations, videos, objects ambiguously poised between two and three dimensions and, last but not least, sculptures.