Corcoran College of Art and Design
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Shadows of History
On View
Shadows of History: Photographs of the Civil War
February 4–May 6, 2012
Holly Bass
Moneymaker
An Endurance Performance by Holly Bass
Saturday, February 11, 2012
10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Muybridge

Exploration Gallery


Visitors to Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change will be immersed in an Exploration Gallery at the exhibition’s conclusion. An electronic timeline will emphasize the remarkable environment of the 19th century. The Exploration Gallery will provide opportunities to explore how Muybridge’s wide influence is manifested in American art today. His role as a catalyst in a technological and aesthetic revolution has continued to transform our representation of time and space. The impact Muybridge’s influence is apparent in photography, books, video, and installation art by selected artists, whose works will be on view in the Exploration Gallery.

The Exploration Gallery offers an opportunity to discover how Muybridge’s influence in the arts continues in a few examples from modern and contemporary artists. Photographs by William Christenberry, Sarah Charlesworth, Ed Ruscha, Harold Edgerton, and Berenice Abbot, for example, reflect Muybridge’s interest in concepts of time, sequenced observations, and split second studies of arrested motion. Other artists—Stacey Steers with her beautiful hand-drawn animations and Mitchell F. Chan and Brad Hindson through an interactive light installation—have adapted and activated images from Muybridge’s Attitudes of Animals in Motion and Animal Locomotion.

There is also a modern day replication of Muybridge’s innovative panorama of pre-earthquake San Francisco by Mark Klett, known for his rephotographic surveys of 19th-century landscapes. All the works in this gallery evoke an enduring appreciation of Muybridge’s original discoveries and experimental language from more than a century ago.