Linsen Chai

Man Ray: When Objects Dream gathers 160 objects from more than 50 US and international lenders centered on the artist's experiments with photograms which he coined as the "rayograph". With these elusive and dream-like images at the core of the exhibition, the curators re-conceptualized the scholarship surrounding Man Ray's artistic output through this medium.

The challenge of presenting his photographic experiments requires a design language which resonates with the visual and philosophical underpinnings of his work as well as ways for the public to engage with it in meaningful ways. The exhibition thus, unfolds across a sequence of layered visual planes that shift, frame, and obscure, which mirrors the process of light, shadow, and exposure fundamental to the artist's method in making his rayographs. Bright gallery spaces at the periphery ground the core rayographs within thematics situating them within larger art history and the artist's oeuvre while doing the necessary didactic lift to appreciate them as finished art works. The core dark space, carpeted and painted in black, centers around the projection of Return to Reason surrounded by spotlit polished rayographs. Ultimately, the entire exhibition is shaped as a device that allows the viewer to enter into and move through the oneiric inner workings of Man Ray's photographic seeing.

Reviewed in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and the NYTimes.