Alumnus Hans Gindlesberger exhibits at Hallwalls

[Originally published at https://www.hallwalls.org/visual/6652.html]

Trained as a photographer, Hans Gindlesberger has spent several years traversing the periphery of the medium in an exploration of the shifting articulations of photography, its processes, and its meaning in the 21st century. The works included in This Time We Have To Die share a mutable expression of the medium and the ideas surrounding it. If the exhibition title seems to suggest a death of the medium, it is death only in the sense of transformative alteration, springboarding from some initial state into a new form, which may reaffirm its initial state while also suggesting the ambiguity implicit in all new directions. There has always been an exploratory quality to Gindlesberger's photographically-situated projects, tending away from the tried and true iteration of the medium and leaning toward some new formulation. The artist has frequently evidenced less concern about what photography is (or has been), instead querying what photography might become. 

Within this question, Gindlesberger adopts some of the newer mechanisms of photography—Google street view, phone scrolling, AI-assisted generation—to highlight its shifting areas of emphasis. Along the way, he has utilized his own imaginative renderings to complete or fill-in lost images, coalesce the sourced and photographed with the imagined, and even reverted to the traditions of metal casting to bring the inner mechanistic space of the camera into physical form, moving from the materiality of the photograph deeper toward the materiality of the camera itself. In many ways, the various works included in the exhibition underscore how frequently photography has been a springboard—rather than a culmination—of Gindlesberger's explorations.

In a 2018 series hilariously entitled I'm In The Wrong Film, the artist inserts himself into various images across the landscape of Middle America in which the over-arching sense is that of a man lost, not in space or time, but lost within images. Lost within a shifting medium looking toward some horizon for a signpost that indicates direction, possibility. That series, in hindsight, seems like a prescient statement of longing. Is the "wrong film" a description of a a more traditional version of a medium upon the cusp of change? If so, what is the "right" film? Is it his Google street view traversal west across America? Is it using this new technology to re-photograph and question sites of iconic images from the history of photography? Is it the thumb-controlled vertical scroll that possesses us and portends doom? It is uncertain what the right film is.

What certainty there is lies in the malleable qualities that emerge from a form that, perhaps a quarter of a century ago, felt more fixed. But the form has since exploded into both the most expansive medium accessible to the most people as well as an onerous and Big Brotherly reality in our lives. Wherein, then, do we capture its meaning? Gindlesberger's works, it should be noted, do not pine for the past or for some presumed previous authenticity. Like his character from Wrong Film, he is almost a wandering minstrel drifting through the perpetually shifting boundaries of the medium. Along the way, he is not mourning its death but recognizing that even perceptions of demise give rise to new forms and, with that, new attitudes about the world and our place within it.

www.gindlesberger.com

Hans Gindlesberger works conceptually with a broad range of photographic traditions and photo-adjacent processes in seeking to expand the definition of the medium itself. His current research and studio work focuses on the often-overlooked materiality of the image by replicating and translating photographic objects through tactile processes more commonly associated with sculpture, drawing, glass casting, and printmaking. His projects are often anchored in geographies that alternate between real and simulated spaces.

Gindlesberger's work has been shown in over 150 exhibitions, festivals, and screenings including, Galleri Image (Århus, Denmark), Gallery 44 (Toronto, Canada), Miami University Art Museum (Oxford, OH), University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA), Mt. Rokko Int’l Photo Festival (Kobe, Japan), the Voies Off Festival (Arles, France), DongGang Int’l Photo Festival (Yeongwol, Korea), #PostFuture Athens Digital Arts Festival (Athens, Greece), Rust Belt Biennial (Wilkes-Barre, PA), FILE Media Art (São Paulo, Brazil), and the Medium Festival of Photography (San Diego, CA). He has been invited to lecture at venues including FIF_BH (Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts (London, UK), The University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland), and numerous institutions throughout the US. Gindlesberger’s work has received support from the Mary L. Nohl Foundation, Light Work, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others.

In 2022, he was a Fulbright Scholar in residence at Chung-Ang University, home of Korea's pioneering photography program. Currently, he is chair of the Department of Art and Design at Binghamton University, State University of New York.