PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design present Mapping the Stage, a collaborative installation by Philadelphia-based artists Micah Danges and James Johnson.

Informed in part by the formal and perceptual qualities of Fra Angelico’s fifteenth-century painting, The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian , Micah Danges and James Johnson’s window-front installation investigates new ways of making work with tangible, non-photographic materials and celebrates the power of inanimate objects. The project expands Danges’ and Johnson’s mutual interest in the pre-photographic representation of temporality in Renaissance painting, the relationship between images and objects – notably, the point at which the physical world ends and the image begins – and the unconventional use of photographic materials, processes and ideas.

Micah Danges’ (b. 1979) work hovers between image and object, pushing the limit of what a photograph can be. He uses optical distortions that create abstract scenes from everyday items and places, in a distinctive merging of materials and process. For Danges, who prints on unconventional materials like silk and cotton, photography is a flexible and tactile medium. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Abington Arts Center, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Cabrini College and Vox Populi Gallery, and in group shows at London's Tate Modern and Philadelphia's Institute for Contemporary Art, The Print Center and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery. Danges is a recipient of a 2012 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, a 2013 Wind Challenge Grant from the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, and was named a 2015 Fellow by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

James Johnson was born in Syracuse, New York. His art encompasses installation, sculpture, and photography and makes reference to architecture and issues surrounding representation, economics, and power. He is influenced by Conceptual Art and Minimalism. His studio is in Philadelphia.