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In June Savage's abstract monochrome photographic works rough flashes of light emerge from a black field , in what appear to be indefinite satellite images of stars or weather patterns. In the simple shorthand of familiar gestural marks these images conjure infinite space, the existential dilemma, notions of chaos, and the rhetoric of the Sublime.
The precise source of these photographic fragments is ambiguous, but one quickly suspects the original referents to be many things other than the cosmic wonders they evoke. They are like images from a catalogue of simulations, and could readily trace any number of phenomena: a photomicrograph of nerve tissue; dappled light under trees; chalk smudges on a blackboard; or a darkroom disaster.
Savage further distances her imagery from it already obscured source through a fragmentary presentation which recalls wider references. Her large, strip-like rectangular photographs, facemounted behind plexiglass, are constructed to form geometric shapes. One work becomes a large X, directing attention to the title of the installation, Claim, and conjuring notions of land ownership, the marking of a site in territory, and the place of signature in established systems of property.
Two other works form empty squares, referencing systems of mapping which connote the ownership of territories through outlining or delineation, as well as the functional framing of the work of art by the art institution. These works suggest that space, landscape, and the work of art are contested sites: zones which are circumvented by discourse, whose conceptual territory is defined by its legitimating rhetoric.
Six wall clocks, whose faces have been replaced by similar imagery, complete the installation. Defaced in this way they appear more like radar scanning devices than clocks. Only