
Arthur Ou’s thoughtful exhibition features a series of black-and-white photographs of photographers thinking. The artist documented friends and colleagues reading Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The title of each work names the subject and the aphorism he or she is reading. Moyra Davey, who has delved deeply into the experience of reading in her own photographs and writing, is shown in a studio struggling with 4.114: “It must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.” The understated portraits, which capture each person grappling with the text in a particular time and place—libraries, train cars, parks—also convey some of the complexity of Wittgenstein’s “picture theory of language.” Ou’s works are visual representations of abstract ideas having an effect, however small and personal, in the world.