ElizabethMoran_RoseMainReadingRoom_Cuchifritos_ThisSideortheOther_2020.jpg

This side, or the other…

Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space windows
New York, New York
October 9 – October 31, 2020

Participating artists:
Elizabeth Moran, Carlos Rosales-Silva, Christopher Udemezue, and Ziyang Wu

Curated by Rachel Gugelberger with Alyssa Alexander

Press release:

[…]

For This side, or the other..., Moran presents Rose Main Reading Room (East), a video from her ongoing research project Against the Best Possible Sources, which examines the earliest history of the first professional fact-checkers, a role invented in 1922 by Time magazine, and held exclusively by women until 1971. The video features imagery from the ceiling mural of the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, where fact-checkers did their research, and considers what is real (truth), what may appear to be real, and what is a simulacrum—a replacement of reality. Presenting a perpetual sunrise or sunset, the video illustrates a moment suspended in time that never reaches resolution.

Rose Main Reading Room (East) echoes many of our experiences during quarantine, in particular the act of looking outside from inside as the days blend together. Viewing the video from inside the gallery, the subtle image is almost overpowered by the daylight coming in. Only when the sun sets does the video become readily visible, but only to those on the street looking in.