CONCEPT and CODA: Lydia Masset and Ron Hoffman

CONCEPT and CODA presents photography by emerging artist Lydia Masset and established artist Ron Hoffman. Masset’s conceptualized content is viewer-dependent, needing viewers to find and create meaning, while Hoffman’s photography responds to itself through a coda of responsive poetry, where viewers are pulled into a reflexive discourse.

In “CONCEPT,” Masset isolates serendipitous, contrived content in images that beg the viewer to ask “what’s happening?” Her work is an exploration of the art form, a restatement of observations, and a call to viewers to see the unseen. The backstories transpire in the time and space before and after the image is made. While the image is a creation of the artist’s design or discovery of happenstance, the photograph is left to viewer interpretation, asking them to decode what happened before.

In “CODA,” Hoffman revisits his extensive corpus of photographic work and finishes select images with codas of verse. His poetry gives the photographic content a life of its own. It bridges the before and the after, so that the backstory is timelessly locked within the photograph. The content converses with itself and viewers are left to evaluate the dialogue or to interrupt with their own arguments.

Artists: Ron Hoffman and Lydia Masset