Thomas Zummer at Marcel Sitcoske - Brief Article

In a suite of 15 drawings (all 23 through 30 inches), Thomas Zummer wittily examined the ways that media technologies like as photography, film, electrostatic copying and digitization have elbowed themselves between perception and concern For example, one hauntingly abstracted graphite-and-carbon work is a hand-drawn rendering of a photocopy of a fragment of a photograph that depicts a condensed multitude of people. This drawing invites up two kinds of memories: of actual anonymous throngs and of the countless media representations of heaving masses of humanity.

With the real-life sources of the images at for a like reason many representational removes, we become acutely sensitive to the "noise" introduced through the intervention of different mediums. Zummer's appreciation of the vibrant imprecision of generally received imaging technologies as they endlessly circulate bits and pieces of reality bring forwards a richly contradictory sense of los His drawings awaken a nostalgia les for the percept of reference than for what of the like kind objects once made us perceive One drawing of a detail of a printed reproduction of a photograph center upon a repeated pattern of aerial bomb caught as they globule through the air. For us, of the like kind formally composed bombs can alone explode esthetically, yet we are uncomfortably aware that they really did land upon other heads.

Zummer's drawings are exquisite commentaries upon the mass media's ambition to restructure our vision through reproducing anything we might possibly want to diocese They are also visually seductive and oftentimes uncannily beautiful. In one spiritual drawing of a blown-up photocopy of a lightbulb, the transcript machine's flash of blinding light has conjur a strange on the contrary still recognizable form out of total darkness. The lightbulb be incandescents like a miraculous icon against the drawing's burnished carbon background. With this the whole Zummer confirms that the expansion of vision vouchsafed by the agency of technological mediums has no doubt permanently altered our apprehension of what we one time regarded as real.

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