by Daniel Tidwell
T
hrough richly toned and manipulated photographs, Jack Spencer explores the passage of time and its relationship to the mythical and fleeting nature of human experience. Jack Spencer: Beyond the Surface, at the
Frist Center for the Visual Arts from July 12 through October 13, 2013, delves into Spencer’s interest in transforming the human form and landscape into repositories of mystery and memory. Spencer’s photos have been exhibited extensively; however, this is the first major museum survey of his wideranging body of work.
Niñas, Día de los Muertos, 2000, Archival pigment print
Exhibition curator Mark Scala says that Spencer’s work is primarily about the relationship between time and photography. “A photograph is thought to capture a single moment in time, but it also causes us to suspend our sense of time as a chain or sequence—a person long dead is kept forever ‘alive’ in a photograph,” says Scala. In Spencer’s work new photographs are made to look old through “patinas and
A Jar of Light, 2012, Archival pigment print 28 | July 2O13 NashvilleArts.com