Charles Allis Premieres Photo Exhibition This Weekend

Charles Allis Art Museum. Photo by Dave Reid.

The Charles Allis Art Museum is premiering a new photography exhibition this weekend.

The new show should provoke visitors to reconsider how they view and interact with visual media and art when every phone doubles as a high-resolution camera. Titled “Screen Time: Video Art and Photography in the Age of the Internet,” the exhibition will feature the work of more than a dozen visual artists from around the world.

“Almost everyone has a smartphone these days,” Senior Curator Phoenix Brown said in a statement. “We are constantly consuming media and art in the palm of our hands when we scroll through social media. ‘Screen Time’ critiques this mass consumption and explores the influence of online culture from its effects on artistic practice to social conditions.”

The traveling exhibition was organized by Curatorial, a non-profit arts curator, and the pieces in the show were curated by Richard Reinhardt and Phillip Prodger. “Screen Time” began touring in 2022 and has thus far been shown at Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University, Princeton University Art Museum and Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota.

The works included in the exhibition will range from the austere paintings of N. Dash to the surreal photographs produced by renowned Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf. Also on display will be works by Nathalie Djurberg, Marcel Dzama, Peter Funch, Cyrus Kabiru, William Kentridge, Christian Marclay, Marilyn Minter, Vik Muniz, Otobong Nkanga, Robin Rhode, Vee Speers, Mary Sue, Puck Verkade, and Huang Yan.

“Drawn from one of the pre-eminent art collections in Europe, it includes an extraordinary group of artists separated by geography, ethnicity and gender, but united in their concern with the onslaught of information in the twenty-first century,” Curatorial said in a description of the exhibition. “These works include wry references to historical photography and video art while exhibiting a fresh sensibility of humor, self-awareness, and inter-subjectivity, tackling serious issues of identity in a society that is by turns self-obsessed, skeptical, nostalgic and funny.”

“Screen Time” will open at the Charles Allis, 1801 N. Prospect Ave., on Thursday, Feb. 8. with an “after hours” guided tour of the exhibition beginning at 6 p.m. Admission to the event is free.