If you’ve ever been to San Antonio’s Ruby City, you know about its large black box theater, where it screens immersive, multi channel video works. That space has now been completely transformed, and is now brightly illuminated with natural light. Its long, horizontal windows now offer visitors a commanding view of the museum’s external campus and San Pedro Creek below.
The photography exhibition “Unsettled Eye” is the inaugural show to launch in this revamped gallery space.
Drawing on works from the Linda Pace Foundation Collection, the exhibition brings together an eclectic array of photography from 11 national, international and Texas-based artists whose work also hangs in major museums including the Metropolitan in New York, the Guggenheim and the Art Institute of Chicago. Collectively, these works are deliberately disorienting, inviting visitors to do a double-take and look a little closer at the mundane.
A good entry point might be the portrait-like photographs of Allan McCollum and Laurie Simmons. They come from a series (Actual Photos) for which they used a microscope to photograph the heads of the quarter-inch tall plastic people that model train enthusiasts can purchase to populate their railroad dioramas. The photos reveal that because of the distortions that occur on such small scale, multiple editions of the same figure (all seemingly uniform with the naked eye) will look startlingly different under intense magnification…sometimes relatively detailed, other times grotesquely distorted.
There’s a spirit of play in this exhibition, and some of these works aren’t meant to be taken too seriously. Rivane Neuenschwander’s Accidental Alphabet comprises 26 photos that document random occurrences of all the letters of the alphabet that the artist saw when she was out walking, ranging from logos, traffic signs or accidental makings and stains. It’s simply a whimsical meditation on paying attention to the mundane.
But some of these works come freighted with real political and historical weight. Artist Katrina Moorhead re-appropriates a news photograph of the aftermath of a bombing that occurred while she was a child in her native town of Coleraine, Northern Ireland, during the Troubles. Authorities prevented the photo (and others like it) from being circulated, so Moorhead was oblivious of the event until she randomly saw the image in a newspaper article published 40 years later. Like many works in this exhibit, the work re-purposes and appropriates existing images. Here, Moorhead displays the enlarged photograph disorientingly on its side, and gives it the title, Woman Survives Fatal Bomb Blast Forty Years Before She Realizes She Has.
Similarly charged with historical resonance and contemporary relevance, Donald Moffett’s video work Aluminum/Watergate shows footage Moffett took of the Watergate building, ground zero of Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Slowly and mechanically panning back and forth, the grainy black and white footage seems to mimic security camera footage, and serves as a metaphor for holding political authorities in check.
“Unsettled Eye” is a visually satisfying exhibition that manages to snugly fill this massive, newly repurposed gallery space with works by A-List artists, many of which are on view here for the first time. The show is certainly eclectic; though all these works, one way or another, attempt to warp our understanding of the familiar. It may be a little disorienting at times, but that seems to be the point.
“Unsettled Eye” will remain on view at Ruby City until April 27, 2025.
Free, walk-through and opening reception 2-5 p.m. Saturday, June 1, on view by appointment 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Thursday-Sunday through April 27, 2025, Ruby City, 150 Camp St., (210) 227-8400, rubycity.org.
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This article appears in Jun 12-25, 2024.