Beyond the Frame examines the trends of the picturesque through historic and contemporary times to present an alternative engagement with landscape representation. The prints in this exhibition incorporate Carothers’ self-made Claude glass, a small black mirror that was popular among tourists in the 18th century. Travelers turned their backs on scenes and held the black mirror over their shoulders to view softened, idealized landscapes behind them, creating an effect like many do today when making a cellphone selfie with a stylized filter.
The rectangular photographs incorporate the imaginative musings Carothers performed and constructed at sites visited and photographed with a cellphone camera by facing each landscape and positioning the Claude glass in either her hand or on a tripod. Filters were intentionally applied to romanticize the image. Afterward, Carothers’ imagery from the landscape and Claude glass were used to create circular, idealized content as a collaboration with Artificial Intelligence generators.
Visitors are invited to view the images by moving back and forth across the gallery versus viewing imagery from left to right. The rectangular and circular images are paired on opposite walls as a “set,” deliberately positioning viewers between the act of looking over one’s shoulder, romanticized perspectives, and the trends of technologies past and present. By blurring the lines between the real and the artificial, Carothers is working to provide an alternative to landscape representation that asks viewers to consider their identity relative to what is truthful or illusory, the lasting effects of dramatized encounters with wild habitats and actions directed at appropriating places.
Beyond the Frame was first exhibited in the Dario Covi Gallery for the 2023 Photography Biennial at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. The exhibition was later showcased at the Off-70 Gallery in Hancock, Maryland, and Decade in Louisville. Various photographs from the collection have been exhibited at Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA), the Wachung Art Center in Wachung, New Jersey and the Common Gallery in Louisville.