Mailed ephemera collected at the end of the performance Prick! Prick! Prick! by Gina Osterloh. Papers were collected from the gallery floor after the performance and mailed back to the gallery.
François Ghebaly is proud to present Gina Osterloh’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
For this new exhibition, Osterloh presents a series of works for the camera and the photographic frame applying a set of instructions:
Press
Erase
Outline
Slice
Strike
Make an X
Prick!
In all of Gina Osterloh’s works, the artist’s hand is evident. In her constructed sets – hand drawn lines, dots, voids, shadows, and silhouettes cut into and mark the surface of paper. Through mark making, physical posture, and the deliberate placement of the body within her sets, Osterloh actively questions the underlying structures of photography, its modes of perception, and the recognition of signifiers. Whether the end material object is a photograph, projection screen, or wall, the photographic field becomes the surface of articulation.
On opening night, Osterloh’s own body strikes and slices paper for an audience in her performance Prick, Prick, Prick!. Performed with the presence of artist D. Hill, Osterloh expands her ongoing investigation of call and response relationships between the body and photographic frame, as well as repetition and rhythm produced by speech and actions.
For The Implied Body, Nothing to See Here, There Never Was, Osterloh returns to her interest in the photo series as well as mark making for the camera – bending and playing with the grid structure that she looks through on the ground glass of her large format view camera. The conceptual set of moves or instructions applied to the body is in turn applied to the structure of looking itself.
Akin to a photographic time lapse and perhaps the most singular photograph in the exhibition, Drawing for the Camera is a series of free hand, curving line drawings on photo backdrop paper created for the camera. In gallery #2, Osterloh presents her new 16mm film Press and Outline, in which the artist presses into and outlines her own shadow. Both odd as well as intimate – the physical body and its shadow simultaneously oppose and support each other, and at times are rendered indiscernible.
-S.L. 10/31/2025
