For over a decade, Boston artist Kevin Dacey has been photographing cultural spaces such as museums and libraries, creating liquidy surfaces of reflection that dissolve the boundaries between outside and in: between nature and culture, between reality and its multiple refractions. Launching the artist’s yearlong residency at the Redwood – part of the new Redwood Contemporary Arts Initiative – this exhibition presented Dacey’s initial meditations on the ins and outs of this eighteenth-century institution.
Dacey’s recent photographs taken at a wintery Redwood join three earlier bodies of work. Vitrine focuses on museum cases, confounding our sense of what lies within these glass houses or outside them. In NowWhen, spectral museum-goers float in sweeps of white light, suspended between the moment (Now) and its future (When). And in DateTime, brilliant large-format photographs are pierced by points of illumination that spell out cryptic streams of dates: 1917, 1929, 1973.
As exterior and interior fold into one another in multiple ways, Dacey’s photographs blur the line between the material and the cerebral, between the realities that lie outside us and our imagination within. In this way, they press the question: What is located in the photograph and what is our external projection onto it? Which is another way of asking: where does our outside begin and our inside end?
