Marcelo Fontana & Katherine Spinella

Artist Statement

Where the Future Can Meet 

Marcelo Fontana + Katherine Spinella 

With the expansion of digital production in the last 30 years, contemporary photography has undergone a metamorphosis where reality plays an even smaller role in artistic development yet images have become more fluid and potent. Once a mirror, a vehicle for expression, or a simple representation of nature, the image no longer relates to reality, rather referring to optics, narrative, marketing, and surveillance. 

This linear development of the post-image happened through the porosity of the new media, creating a fluid environment to the detriment of exclusive specificities of the past. So far, the stories created are of advances and setbacks, where the future can meet, cross or rejoin the past. This non-linear way of creating narratives and reality is what Marcelo Fontana and Katherine Spinella seek to understand in Where the Future Can Meet. 

Observed through the proliferation of shared ‘photo dumps’ as contemporary diaries or still-life paintings of the present, images become unspecific personal artifacts. What would the story on the card in the museum read? The more ordinary or unflattering personal present becomes more “real.” In this, we engage with hypervisibility as an absurdity for coping with the present. Like a garden walk or watching a fire burn, we crave instances that are non-decisive moments outside spectacle and production. This collaborative work by Marcelo Fontana and Katherine Spinella creates works for reflection on topics of transparency, opacity, grief, and longing centered around post-photographic sentiments.

Marcelo Fontana & Katherine Spinella | Portland, OR