All Theory is Gray, but the Tree of Life Springs Ever Green
Exhibition on the occasion of the Museum’s 90th anniversary
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The works in the exhibition, curated from the Museum’s collections, were selected for their power to create discourse and new meaning when placed next to works of other mediums, periods, artistic outlooks, or cultural contexts.
Each work is stripped of its original context, displaced from the artistic endeavor that it was part of, and removed from the circumstances of time and place and the culture and themes that had served as its contextual anchor of stable meaning. This makes it possible to extract the work from its original interpretive framework and to turn the gaze on the new syntax in which it has now found itself.
* The title of the exhibition was derived from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's play Faust.
Roger Ballen, Prowling, 2001
Black-and-white photograph, silver print
Gift of the artist, 2014
© Roger Ballen