West Cove Studio & Gallery

At The Edge of Things: Twenty-Four Photographers
August 25 through September 17, 2011

There is a Catherine Opie photograph of a group of surfers whose heads, like those of some decapitated martyrs set afloat, are just visible above the water’s surface, but there appears to be no edge to the setting they abide in. It is some nether world where endlessness is a category of punishment which the borders of the image can do nothing to contain. It was this encounter that set me to thinking about the possibility of an exhibition that would wander from the outlines of geometry to the limits of perception. Photography reinvented the edges of things when it entered the world outside the studio, isolating boundaries within an image, and drawing new ones with the frame. But it also proved capable of raising questions as to whether lines of demarcation are ever as precise as a surveyor’s plot might make them seem. Here, then, are a number of photographers whose work I have come to know as leading me to the brink, but never letting me fall.                                                                                                  Stephen Vincent Kobasa