/CLOUD/ #17

Assembly presents /CLOUD/ by Barry Stone, a project inspired by Alfred Steiglitz’s, “Equivalents,” a series of iconic cloud studies made from 1922-30. Stieglitz’s pictures were not intended to describe the material nature of clouds, but rather express the artist’s inner emotional state. 100 years after Steiglitz, Stone’s photographs were taken with a digital camera and manipulated by rearranging their code with a hexadecimal editor used by programmers. The resulting chance operations create a new version of each cloud, altered with its own digital “material.” Clouds seen in nature are highly variable ephemeral structures that are shaped and animated by our imaginations. Each photograph presented here continues this cycle of endless possibility, open to the meaning that each viewer brings to the subject.