"Photographs by Michael Amato that focus on society’s relationships with the 24/7 news cycle, social media, propaganda, and more will be featured in an exhibit in the Southern Light Gallery at Amarillo College.
Amato’s exhibition is titled Narcissus Narcosis and the photographs will be on display from Sept. 17 to Oct. 24 in the gallery, which is located on the first floor of the Ware Student Commons on AC’s Washington Street Campus.
The exhibit is free and open to the public.
Amato is the Hilla Rebay Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Much of his work carries a central theme of paranoia as it relates to the advancement of technology and its impact on the human mind and society.
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and it has been featured in several prominent photography journals and print publications, including WIRED Magazine.
“The images in this exhibit are of the ever-present TV in our culture,” Amato said. “They provide the viewer a place to contemplate their own relationship with the 24/7 news cycle in our society. They also relate to many contemporary topics, such as privacy, social media and propaganda.”
Amato says he borrowed the title for his exhibition – Narcissus Narcosis – from a phrased coined by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor/philosopher, in a 1969 interview in Playboy.
According to the McLuhan, who died in 1980, Narcissus Narcosis is “a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible."
For more information about the Amato photo exhibit or the Southern Light Gallery, please contact René West, assistant professor of photography, at rwest@actx.edu or 806-345-5654."
-Amarillo College
