THOMAS ZUMMER: LUCE ET UMBRAE
June 6—july 6, 2002
Opening Reception: Thursday June 6, 5–7 pm

Marcel Sitcoske Gallery is proud to present a show of a series of drawings that begin with an examination of the technologies used to record light and shadow, namely: photography, cinema, video and digital imaging. All of these technologies intercede, often invisibly, between our perception of the image and the actual object to which it refers.

Luce et Umbrae: literally, Brightness and Shadows, from Latin luce (in daylight or brightness) and umbrae (a shadow, trace, image, appearance, outline, semblance, pretense, pretext or cover). Zummer tampers with cameras and various other devices in order to better study how an image is affected by its passage between media. The final translation of an image, for example, as a drawing of a photocopy of a print of a digital capture of an interstitial frame of a video transfer of a 16mm film print, secures the image at a point that is never meant to be seen. The interlacing or blurring of images to create video or cinema-smooth movement, is a kind of temporal anti-aliasing, so that the illusion of continuous movement is preserved, but when that process is arrested some very strange things occur, and a surprising palimpsest of the traces of technical reproducibility are revealed. Zummer’s drawings are the result of a good deal of performative tinkering with media, prior to the activity of drawing, not in order to produce a range of aesthetic effects, but to draw out the strange disposition of images as they are, and not necessarily as they are perceived. For Zummer it doesn’t matter whether one draws a grain of sand, a blade of grass, a motion-blur, scan lines or pixels, since in his hands the process of drawing is subjected to the same kind of scrutiny and unrelenting auto-deconstruction as the consideration of other, technically reproduced, shadows.

". . . a sustained and phenomenally inventive meditation on media, on technology, and on human consciousness."
—Keith Sanborn
". . . Zummer’s drawings are exquisite commentaries on the mass media’s ambition to restructure our vision by reproducing anything we might possibly want to see. They are also visually seductive and uncannily beautiful."
—Ernest Larsen

". . . there are any number of artist's who read philosophy; Thomas Zummer, on the other hand, is a philosopher who makes strange and exquisite works of art..."
—Richard RabkinThomas Zummer is an artist, scholar, writer and curator.

Recent publications include “Projection and Dis/embodiment: Genealogies of the Virtual,” a catalogue essay for Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977 (Whitney Museum/Abrams), CRASH: Nostalgia for the Absence of Cyberspace (with Robert Reynolds), “What the Hell is That?” (Beehive Microtitles #1), a digital e-book on cinema and the taxonomy of monsters, and a catalogue of drawings and texts entitled Portraits of Robots & Other Recent Works. He is currently completing a book, Intercessionary Technologies: Archive/Database/Interface, on the early history of reference systems. Mr Zummer’s works have shown worldwide, with recent exhibitions at TENT/Witte de Wit Museum/Rotterdam, the Frederieke Taylor Gallery, White Box and Angel/Orensanz in NYC, and he has forthcoming exhibitions in Paris, London, Edinburgh, Brussels, Toronto and Austin, Texas. Thomas Zummer is a frequent lecturer on philosophy and the history of technology, and currently teaches in the Critical Studies Department at New York University. In 2002-03 he will be visiting professor in the Transmedia Programme at the Ecole des beaux arts/Sint Lukas in Brussels, Belgium. Thomas Zummer lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.