During October 2015 Proxy is hosting “Long Exposure,” an exhibition by artist Nathan Gulick.

A digital screen, behind a view hole, contains about 62,000 pictures that Gulick took. The bottom of the gallery is covered by a floor length red velvet “curtain” reminiscent of peep shows, old theater houses or Catholic confessional booths. The “floor” of the gallery is open, and each viewer is invited to select, enlarge, or scroll along this exciting yet mundane collection.
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The exhibition seeks to approach the condition of cinema, (darkness, intimacy) yet makes use of the unique memory and remote access capabilities of the digital screen, a window to an unseen and unknowable infrastructure, to make possible the biggest ever one-person exhibition in the smallest possible space. The viewer is the curator who, faced with a huge unclassified database, has to not simply see, but decide what they are looking for or at.

Intimate yet impersonal, trivial yet important, private and public, thrilling or boring, the pictures epitomize one of the contemporary conditions of digital photography: its proliferation, ubiquity, erasability and instant shareability. We are faced with ephemeral data, pixels on a screen, that bypass the print. They are infinitely reproducible but gone at the moment you lose power or you click delete.

From the outside, the personification and erotization of the gallery adds a melancholic sculptural alibi: it expresses the forward looking and the backward looking of digital photography, and the dilemma of the artist-photographer in the digital age.