In an age of ideological darkness, Ted Heibert's Unbecomings inquires into the vampiric nature of art-making, photography and personal transformation. Mobilizing effigies of natural demise -- symbols of death -- Unbecoming is literally a death-masked performance of photographic self-representation. If photography can steal souls, perhaps it can also give them back, reanimating the self as an extension of a violated natural world and, in so doing, simultaneously resurrecting the ghosts of nature, brought back from nothingness to haunt the delirium of contemporary self-representation.
Ted Hiebert’s work explores the relationship between darkness and the imagination, mobilizing the codes of photographic representation for their material, psychological and delusional possibilities. While photography is often referred to as a "writing with light" -- a vision-based illumination of image -- it has an equally powerful, though less commonly articulated inverse side, namely its debt to darkness -- both with the light-tight shell of the camera itself, and the light-deprived experience of darkroom processing. Here, in the codes of darkness and touch, an inverse side of photographic practice is exposed, with all the redemptive poignancy of images stolen and presences returned.
Tuesday through Saturday, 11 AM to 5 PM - * admission is always free

Reception: Friday, September 11, 2009 at 7 PM
For more information, visit http://www.thenewgallery.org .