Hard Copy

Nakamura reproduces the same image four hundred times, each generation degrading further. By the last wall the subject is gone and the grain is the subject. Hard Copy is photocopies as a theory of memory — and it is more rigorous than most shows that announce themselves as conceptual.

You walk the sequence left to right. Early prints are crisp: a face, a window, a hand on a railing. Midway, the face is becoming weather. By the end you are looking at noise and calling it a portrait, which is, Nakamura suggests, what we have been doing all along.

The gallery notes are mercifully short. The work does the arguing. Print as medium, print as metaphor, print as the thing that survives when the original doesn't. It is an exhibition you finish in twenty minutes and think about for weeks.

Quietly one of the stronger shows of the year — and it never raises its voice.