archive

Exhibition

Monument Valley brings together the work of three young artists, Karin Bubas, Trevor Mahovsky and Scott Myles. Karin Bubas has developed a body of photographs depicting the interior and exterior of her friends and family’s homes. In the series here, she continues this theme using a three-dimensional collage technique, building multiple layers of individual photographs which replicate the conglomeration of objects which accrue in the apartments and houses of people she knows.

Scott Myles produces conceptual and process-oriented installations, performances, photographs and video. Much of his work is semi-documentary of time based events. In Everything Inbetween, October 02 1996 – March 23, 1998 , the two self portraits were taken a year and a half apart. In the earlier image, Myles was photographed crouching on a garage roof in his home town of Dundee, Scotland, in front of a Marlboro cigarette ad depicting Monument Valley Utah. Myles later traveled to Garfield County in Utah, the actual site in the photograph, and restaged this portrait in front of the “real” landscape. In Revolving Upside Down (VAG) Myles breakdances, badly, on the ceiling of an art gallery. Its easy to decipher that the video is upside down, not only because the television is, but that in front of and below Myles is Vancouver artist Rodney Graham’s photograph Tree (panorama) [1991], which for anyone familiar with his work, is wrongly the ‘right’ way up. The scene was shot in the Vancouver Art Gallery while Myles was working as a security guard there, evidenced by his institutional maroon and grey uniform. Myles will also be exhibiting documents of a performance that will start on his arrival in late November back in Dundee. Entitled Seeing Home Again for the First Time, Myles will act as if he is a tourist in his home town, relying on a guidebook to navigate Dundeeês •points of interestê. Rather than see his parents and friends immediately, he will book himself into the local youth hostel and start writing post-cards to friends in Vancouver. These will be displayed at the Or as they arrive.

Trevor Mahovsky’s work combines the hard veneer of minimalist sculpture with a softer, roughly pre-cinematic interior. Animated back-lit dioramas featuring children’s toys are housed within each of the two plywood sculptures. In the L-shaped Lantern for Corner, one branch features a land of dinosaurs, and in the other branch an astronaut carries out an unspecific task on some distant planet or moon. In Four Lanterns a soldier’s voice commands his allies to “back him up” in the battlefield. Abutted almost against the gallery walls, one can only achieve an awkward glimpse of the shadow play cast by the toys by literally sitting or crawling over the plywood sculpture.

The formal dissimilarity between each of these artists contrasts to what I think are some shared themes. All utilize a simple means of crafting illusions, of creating the momentary belief that something else is occurring. Myles’ two photographs initially appear as the same one, while his video seems to suspend the laws of gravity. Mahovsky’s sculptures appear to house an elaborate and very active world within their interior. Bubas brings an illusionistic three-dimensionality to the two-dimensional representation of someone’s home. Each of these illusions is easily defeated under any inspection, and I think it is in this defeat where their work begins.

Myles works revolve around his desired and actual displacement from his home in Scotland, and the fantasy that travel to a new location may allow the development of a new persona. This is brought up short in his video by the fact that boring jobs as security guards are somewhat globally universal. In the photographs of the mesas of Monument Valley, the mythological American frontier which Marlboro utilizes to romanticize its cigarette brands are the backdrop to his fictional and real placement in that landscape. Which depiction of this is “real” becomes secondary to time and distance, and cost, between the geographic points, and is subtly depicted in the infinitesimal differences between the two images. In Seeing Home Again for the First Time, Myles simplifies the history and ties to his hometown, denying the emotional experience one normally associates with home.

Mahovsky’s sculptures infantilize the brute ‘objecthood’ and static monumentality of minimalist sculpture by inserting a looping, kinetic and childlike narrative into its interior and onto the adjacent walls. The pre-modern, and pre-cinematic technique of the magic lantern polarizes the historical moment between the onset of modernism and film technology in the 19th century with its Greenbergian apotheosis in the ’60s and ’70’s, in this case the minimalist sculptures of artists Donald Judd or Robert Morris. The shadow show illicits the child’s world of narrative dissolution within an encompassing world of dinosaurs, war or space, and is a realm of role playing fantasy at odds with the psychic absence that apologists would suggest is the ideal receptive mode for viewing ‘high modernist’ art.

Bubas’ recreation of her friends apartment joins the objective realism of conceptual photography with a desire to make the images more evocativley ‘real’, of crafting a picture that teases at the desire to inhabit a space. The photographs have an eerie resonance their three-dimensionality becomes more pronounced the nearer one approaches them, and like bas-relief sculpture at a certain distance, the apartments and homes become almost stereoscopic. They deteriorate into artifice as one looks minutely at Bubas’ construction method, suddenly evoking the cut out paper worlds that could be assembled as a goofy architecture for toy figurines. Bubas, like Mahovsky and Myles, reflects a desire to imaginatively inhabit a fictive space, of losing oneself in another identity – in this case of her friends living spaces. Her meticulous recreation of their surroundings moves away from a documentary portrayal, and her cut and paste remaking of it physicalizes her relationship to them.

Each artist works with a friction between modes of representation and with ideas of unrealizable fantasies, and each uses the childlike abandon that comes with the suspension of belief as a method of creating friction with a world of monumentalized and abstract representation. This tension points to the illusory mechanics we facilitate in order to acculturate ourselves to the world, and to the necessity of imaginative intervention.

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to host a 2-person exhibition of the new work of Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt and Vancouver artist Damian Moppett. Moppett’s series of paintings are a critique of youth culture while Dekyndyt’s work alters the walls and windows of the gallery forcing the viewer to search for the changes that the artist made. All the works exhibited demonstrate the powerful messages that can be created through the use of simple materials.

Exhibition

Exhibition

Francis Alÿs is one of the most important artists working in Mexico City today. While he is known internationally for his collaborative works with sign-painters orrotulistas and for his performance walking projects, Alÿs has always been interested in the relationship of animals to their environments, and in particular dogs living in urban spaces. As a walker, Alÿs sees cities at a slow pace and observes the animal life in the streets. He photographs dogs in every city he visits and often depicts dogs interacting with humans in his paintings. Several of Alÿs’ walking and installation projects have included small sculptures of dogs; in The Collector the artist built a little toy-like dog on wheels out of magnets. Alÿs then walked the dog through the city and later archived the metal detritus that accumulated all over the animal’s body. In The story of Negrito, the 3-legged dog, Alÿs cast Negrito as the central protagonist who turns bad luck to advantage. Dogs’ life as portrayed by Alÿs is relevant to the human condition, but never of it. The Or Gallery displayed the artist’s videos, photographs, paintings, drawings and sculptures featuring dogs together with material from the artist’s dog archive including figurines, prototypes, clippings and photographs .

Exhibition

A recent graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Scott Evans exhibited sculptures created over the last year. Evans produced a number of works which fetishistically combine small toys and children’s playthings – dolls, motorized cars, models – into large scale assemblage works which were then painted and physically anthropomorphized. The works he produced for the Or Gallery continued this theme but were developed through the addition of natural found materials: moss, lichens, twigs and other detritus found near his home on the outskirts of Vancouver. The formal disjunction combines the mass produced and abjectified children’s commodities with materials normally associated with a rural folk art ready made.

Exhibition

Documents for Performance considered an engagement with performance through the use of photography and video. The front gallery was occupied by eleven large black and white photographs of performances with accompanying texts. The back room featured a video installation depicting a (seemingly) live video feed of Radul carrying out a visceral performance in the basement of the Or Gallery Building.

Exhibition

&tActuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is the void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.

- George Kubler, The Shape of Time, 1962

We were meeting to drink and talk. A few of us had gathered already when Euan arrived. He entered the kitchen and offered no greeting, instead emphatically asking the room-at-large, “Have you ever looked up ‘hole’ in the dictionary?”

No one answers.

Euan swings his hand up, finger and thumb separated about two inches. “The definition’s THIS BIG and they still can’t tell you what it is!!”

Like the dictionary, Euan Macdonald approximates a version of “hole,” the question of how to speak of a “lack of.” Admittedly, there is a sense of pathos operating in Macdonald’s Blockheads, a series of paintings on vacuformed plastic. Their only facial signatures are simple unpainted ovals for eyes and, gathered together, they appear to be full of holes, including their flat and vacuous ;brain cavities.” It may at first appear that their only remark will be a mute stupefaction. They appear to be representations of pure inertia. Nothing much is happening and nothing much is bound to happen. So it would seem but, as usual, that’s not the whole story.

Despite the literal appearance of holes or gaps in the physical forms of the Blockheads, the question of space becomes tangential to the question of time. The “hole” becomes the “moment” and there is an interesting formal signal in Macdonald’s Ball video that cues this. The piece could not be more simple, banal or innocuous. A yellow ball bounces up. And down. An endlessly-repeating loop of the “quintessential bounce,” the vertical motion of the ball serves as the de-facto googly-eyes of the Blockheads, replacing any “pre-millennial angst” that might be read in their gaping faces with something more like anticipation. It’s a fabulously cheap virtual trick to accentuate and insist upon a recognition of the moment, a naggingly-pleasant metronome to mark the “interchronic pause” when nothing is happening but everything is about to.

In The Shape of Time, George Kubler writes that “man’s native inertia is overcome only by desire” and Macdonald incorporates this idea of desire – and its seeming implausibility – into the broader predicament of remaining ever-in-the-present. In Two Planes, we are presented with a large-scale model of two smooth white planes, one atop the other, attempting to engage in improbable humpage. As ludicrous as it seems, we can’t deny the insistence of the gesture and hence the possibility that these two DC-class planes might eventually get it on. But it hasn’t happened yet and we are vexed along with the planes, caught in the moment of perpetual desire.

A few years ago, Macdonald had been painting small figures on flying carpets. He has come back to this reference in spirit with Two Places At Once, two small paintings with casual grid lines suggesting an aerial view of the urban landscape. Macdonald’s lines don’t depict a stark urban grid but are instead loose and easy, referring back to the smooth edges of the Blockheads. This simple depiction places the viewer within a perspective too distant for content or narrative, in a place where the only option is a consideration of the moment, the present, and all the possibilities still before us.

Two Places At Once also explicitly introduces the notion of simultaneity to this rumination on time and actualizing the moment. The idea that “actualized moments” are happening elsewhere at the same time (or perhaps ought to be happening) diminishes the possibility of a singular perspective and a cynical reading, replacing this with an expansiveness and generosity. The video Interval furthers this idea of simultaneity by again presenting two distinct perspectives, this time in a single still shot.

Interval, 1997

The shadows of two palm trees cut across a section of four lane highway, with cars passing intermittently in both directions. It’s a short loop of just over two minutes, but within that time a casual optical shift occurs. Two narratives unfold atop each other within the image, as thought it were a double exposure. This is provoked in part by the glaring sunlight – which washes the entire image in a perfect light and deepens the shadows of the palm trees – and their gently swaying motion with its unabashedly hypnotic quality.

The effect is entirely convincing and then, part way through the video, the traffic vanishes and no cars are to be seen. During this brief interval, the reference to simultaneity disappears and we are forced to address only the shadows. They continue swaying, a motion which now serves to evoke the sensation that we have entered a suspended moment, the interchronic break when nothing happens. It only lasts a few seconds and then the simultaneous action renews and the “dialogue” of the shadows and the lanes of passing cars become universes unto themselves once again.

Looped repeatedly, the interval becomes increasingly more apparent upon each viewing until we begin to anticipate its appearance. Its urgency is quiet but insistent: the only actuality we can ever really know is the one happening right now, the glorious void between past and future, happening all the time and everywhere.

The pause that refreshes.

John Massier
Curator, Koffler Art Gallery,
North York, Ontario

Exhibition

Deliverance might be perceived as a state of grace, a transitional space of liberation. In this installation, deliverance is a wry commentary on its own elusive nature, on the threat of its social underbelly and of its twilight nature. It is also an in-between moment in space, replete with images of a neighbourhood where the street where you live is not so much an invitation to romance as a murmur of its residents collective ennui.

Walking into the darkened room, you perceive an object which is vaguely reminiscent of some type of 19th medical or scientific device for examining viscera and the like. It is a projector, a circular apparatus, replete with motor, lens, filmstrips, colour transparency working to suggest an experimental film projector from another era. It casts its suburban deliverance onto the surrounding walls with a tidy languor.

These images are of a particularly monotonous neighbourhood , a spanking new development promising the epitome of cul-de-sac living.

step on a crack

break your mother’s back

A woman rubs her hand back and forth through her hair, a gesture of impatience, of weariness, of luxury even, the luxuriousness of ennui. A man types at his computer, echoing the woman’s gesture with his own caress of futility and stupor. These are not moments of rest, nor necessarily of anticipation, although they do anticipate,however the truth of mood rests in the sense of a solitary wait admist the social conformity of architectural space.

Other images float by – leaves, bits of debris, and rats. These are the less pristine elements of suburbia – its dirty bits which mock (with helpful hints from Heloise in the kitchen) the rigid sameness of the two-car garages.

The contrast between the arthroscopic nature of the projector and the dreamy, blurry images it projects manifests as an unsettling sensation of this landscape, undermining the respectability and normalcy of its driveways, eaves, roofing systems, its pastel brand-newness. This cul-de-sac is truly the end of the road.

The space depicted here is unrelenting in its blandness, its bleakness, its pathos. There is the huge green electrical box, complacently installed on a front lawn, providing the necessary circuity for domestic harmony amongst its residents. It is there, but in its modern shell, it disappears into the environment, purring efficiently, never revealing its operating system. In contrast, the home-made projector is a one-off object, raw and unique, conjuring up the eccentric’s Rube Goldberg invention. However, what it offers is delivered with eloquence and grace, proposing both a question about filmic sensibility as well as one of its own making. Its construction belies the economic order of its projected scenario.

Relief from the despair is found in the quirky elements of the piece. Its mechanisms are not seamlessly hidden, the choppy syncopation of the motor acts as a bored backdrop to the actors, who are whimsically out of scale with the arch-uniformity of the houses. Even the dark brooding sky is almost tongue-in-cheek, like the transparency from which it originates.

Will I be handsome

Will I be rich

I tell them tenderly

Que sera sera

Deanne Achong
April 1998

Exhibition

Black Light club murals and recent works on paper.
Ingolia, former member of San Francisco’s queer-punk group The Popstitutes exhibits for the first time outside the U.S.

“Clubland revolves around the premise of escape and unification.” – Ggreg Taylor, creator of Product

Soon after its launch in 1993 Product quickly became the biggest weekly queer nightclub in San Francisco’s history. In its one year existence, it attempted to create “something more than cavernous rooms with sound systems and a light show” (Ggreg Taylor). Tyler Ingolia’s murals and cut-out figures are relics from this environment. Though only fragments of a larger and more complex milieu, they illustrate the club’s anarchistic and innovative aura. Ingolia’s Tom of Finland clowns deflate their power as proud and hyper-masculine characters. He combines images from the movie Alien with a camp aesthetic, and invokes a critical connection between the role of the club as a fantasy location of gay liberation and the predatorial, subordinating hierarchy which exists within its social structure.

Exhibition

Phil McCrum has developed a body of work over the last thirteen years which demands critical attention. McCrum’s practice focuses on the relationship between the artist and the viewer, and specifically on the role of the gallery in negotiating that relationship. Never accepting that an artist is independent of the economies which govern all social contracts, McCrum uses a number of tactics to analyse how the context and history of the gallery, and the artists role within it, are formulated. Employing drawing, painting, video and photography, writing and installation as methodological tools, McCrum is devoted to uncovering how different political and economic systems affect the meaning of different types of visual images.

McCrum’s exhibition, entitled “Tear”, consists partly of large scale canvases developed in the manner of abstract expressionistic drip paintings. McCrum, employs paint from household mistints, however, as a way of foregrounding an economic uncontrollability in opposition to the mythic, and phallic, uncontrollability of the male artists ‘method’. Class always plays a part of McCrum’s art and a second project for the exhibition developed through an investigation of portraiture and the mutable and interchangeable meanings of iconic, famous, infamous and anonymous individuals. Entitled “The French Revolution”, McCrum inserts portraits of his friends and acquaintances into the roles of the Revolution’s key figures. This gently questions the relative roles we play in historical moments by conflating the past with a familiar and local present.

TEAR (The Practice of Non Practice)

A key bit of art world logic is that in order to succeed (i.e. sell work and get invited into bigger exhibitions), an artist has to being making work all the time. Outside of what’s hot, what’s sexy, what’s ‘been done’, few make careers out of an occasional piece-Duchamp perhaps the exception that proves the rule. As someone who only makes a few things now and then I think my success is contingent on this. I don’t blame my job or my financial situation because deep down I think that if I really wanted to I’d be able to find the money and time.

I had a conversation with someone about Phil once, and they said he wasn’t more successful because “he didn’t want it.” What they meant was that he didn’t produce enough work. I think he does “want it”, whatever that is, its just that he goes through periods where art doesn’t get made. If The Practice of Non-Practice refers to the question of whether or not the art in this exhibition constitutes a “practice”, I think it also-or as condition of that question-asks how these gaps, these periods of not-making-art, are considered. If they’re just down-time-time when “not wanting it” supersedes the motivation and desire of success, it also means that activity is constructive and ‘healthy for the career’ and that in-activity is its obverse-not just neutral, but ultimately destructive of ‘goals’. As self evident as this may be, it begs a lot of questions. I’m most curious about how activity became synonymous with production.

Reid Shier

McCrum and Lenin

“Not only do I not ‘philosophize’ with their philosophy, I do not ‘philosophize’ like them at all. Their way of ‘philosophizing’ is to expend fortunes of intelligence and subtlety for no other purpose than to ruminate in philosophy. Whereas I treat philosophy differently, I practise it as Marx intended, in obedience to what it is. That is why I believe I am a ‘dialectical materialist.’” (Lenin)

One of the continuing principles of McCrum’s work and which connects it more to that which has followed in the past decade (which is the say the canonization of low art) than to the too neat photographers around is the inversion of the classic Leninist dictum – the ends justify the means – so that what is at hand by “chance” (be it the series of photos in the daily paper or material at Dressew and lack of time – most infamously to the parameters of the artist fee [back, psychoanlysis] – his battle cry “I know guys they get to town, they’re handed a paintbrush and a hammer and told to get to it” as well as his own exclusion as topoi) then, incorporated into the art work in a manner which not only renders – rednecks? – the means into the end; which is to say, the object of the art work: for then, in a loser wins logic of the dialectic, the “chance” or aleatory nature of such materials, concepts, etc., is revealed to be social after all – the return of class.

Clint Burnham

Loaded: 250 for Phil McCrum

Out on the stone surface I weighed the mitts, not enough, faithful, enough, worldly, frugal, ruthless, brazen, bragging, looking unsound, not yours, you are sound, four legs, many too many, dissolve, recognized another, spruced cube, plugged exposed nickel, permissive, bumping into a wall, listen to the experience, I cannot tell from welt who made it, none other, I demand to speak to, taste hurts, around do you do, once begun once unfinished, twice began you know the rest, sly, happy, faithful, flats in motion, devious, calm, vindictive, behind door number pretended, clumsy, sensitive, morbid, afraid, angry, bored, cheerful, me, snobby, you, stoic, me, surprised, you, suspicious, arrogant, conceited, confused, dignified, not the experience one has, envious, eager, in hearing or saying it, astonished, imperturbed, genial, taken for discernment, despondent, one would like to say, every word, different character, noble, baffled, one character, single physiognomy, bear qualities, it looks at us, cha cha cha, still looks at us, what has meanwhile altered, none and then some, but a face in a painting looks at us too, inch to the room, nailed down dust, word in edgewise, I may find some use for this word yet, but it is not now, what is it now, imperturbed, two of you are going into that room alone, another two of you are coming out, see, what has changed, the lightening, shmushed shadows now, anybody could do, long lost concentration, long time bearer, slack, cut off from the surface, doubtful.

Dan Farrell

“I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it everyday.”

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein

Deanna Ferguson

Exhibition

You See Before You A Work Of Monumentality, Marked Not By Years But By Decades.

The Vancouver Academy of Mechanized Warfare and Party Headquarters stands above the current standard of Vancouver architecture, but stands abreast of the spirit and will of the revolutionary people of Vancouver. The City of Vancouver, that which leads the way for the rest of Canada, that which is showing us and the world the future of the Canadian nation, shall finally be bequeathed by the Canadian people an edifice worthy of their great spirit.

The Vancouver Academy of Mechanized Warfare and Party Headquarters stands as a monument to our time, to our newfound faith in the future. Its majestic dignity sets it apart from the constructions of the old order, in bold contrast to the formalist, corrupt architectural experiments of the past. It is an emerging type of architecture, of philosophy, specific to the emerging will of the Canadian people. The greatness of its concept, the harmony of its proportion expresses to all the nobility of purpose of the Canadian nation.

The edifice itself stands in front of Mechanization Square, preceded by a monumental statue of a typical fighting hero of our courageous Canadian armed forces. The powerful architectural form is flanked by old growth Douglas Fir trees, indigenous to the Vancouver area and imported from the surrounds to organically integrate the site with the majestic British Columbia wilderness. The austere form of the structure, the strength of its lines and proportions, is adorned by three monuments; two of them proud figures from our heroic armed forces,making it plain to all the courage and valour which has forced our nation to the forefront of the world stage. At the centre of the building standing on a pedestal between the grand stairs leading to the entrance stands a colussus, a figure of immense stature. This is a representation of the Indian warrior, the proud grandfather of the Canadian warrior tradition. It is the cunning and prowess of the Indian, and the technology of our European ancestors that forged the spirit of our great nation into what it is today. Soaring atop the academy, soaring over all of Vancouver is a great and glorious eagle, at home here in its natural habitatof British Columbia. This statue, like the others, is made of stainless steel,twelve tons of steel, to sreate this truly extraordinary creature, watching over and inspiring not only the entire city of Vancouver, but the whole of our nation.

The Vancouver Academy of Mechanized Warfare and Party Headquarters is to be located on Twelfth Avenue, across from the impressive Vancouver City Hall, built in 1936. The monumentality of the Academy is a stunning compliment to the designs of Townley and Matheson, architects of the Vancouver City Hall. The new addition will be set well back from City Hall, thud creating the expansive Mechanization Square, ideal for mass rallies and military parades. The site of the future Academy of Mechanized Warfare is atop a great hill, making it visible throughout the city, and giving it great presence in the Vancouver skyline.

Truly this majestic creation deserves the attention and admiration of the great people of Vancouver. This noble structure, distinguished in all its simplicity, will serve to guide and inspire all progressive and revolutionary people the world over, creating in Canada a shining example to the whole world, an example of what can be accomplished by a people, a nation, united behind a guiding idea, with purpose, with pride, and the envy of the entire world.

Exhibition

“Accident Prone,” a new series of photographs by Nancy Davenport, offers a meditation on human contingency and our tragic compulsion to create order in the face of random events. In each of the eleven sublime silver print landscape photographs, a character is about to suffer a fatal misfortune, be it a free fall from a cliff, an attack by a wild animal, or a boulder dropping toward the head. Davenport’s images recall the romantic landscape tradition of nineteenth century artists such as Casper David Friedrich, yet whereas that tradition grants the spectator a sense of absorptive repose and visual mastery, the impending mishaps of “Accident Prone” produce a sense of anxiety and uncanny humour, asking that one contemplate death as an absolute limit to the visible.

Fictional biographies of the character whose demise we are about to witness accompany the images as captions, functioning as a kind of disembodied voice-over. Rather than offer a full biographical account of these unfortunate victims of entropic destruction, the appended texts use a dry documentary style reminiscent of statistical studies or psychological case histories, so that what remains reads like an enigmatic obituary.

Visually stunning and conceptually beguiling, the photographs in “Accident Prone” offer panoramic landscapes and narrative cul-de-sacs, playfully enjoining the spectator to look for a story in what ultimately resists narrative. Davenport’s work suggests that being prone to accidents means being exposed to that which admits of no social accounting—the alternately terrifying and absurd specter of one’s own death, the ultimate omission.

Text courtesy of Linda Kirkland Gallery, New York.

Exhibition

First Draft
January 1998

The work presented here is only a selection of relatively recent work. There are no examples of my previous work, and an overall view of my photographic oeuvre is incomplete. This exhibition is perhaps inhibited by these simple limitations. In considering the development of a valid contemporary photographic practice today I have simultaneously accepted the picture making tradition while acknowledging the influence of conceptualism to recent photography. I conceive of my total photographic oeuvre to be a pluralistic and heterogeneous archive, involving several photographic models and diverse subjects.

The city is one of the staple subjects of photography. As a latent image it is present from the medium’s inception, and a historical genealogy would suggest that the medium’s ancestor, the camera obscura, developed from a new consideration of human vision and its construction of urban space. There is a special relationship between photography and the city that no other artistic medium can claim with equal validity. This relationship is constituted primarily by their mutual respect for perspective, but also photography’s inherent indexical idiosyncrasy. A lesser known history of early photography suggests that the city as a subject was ideal for the conditions and limitations of the medium’s less mature forms of technology – so with technical improvements inversely photography’s development moves away from the still-object nature of urbania towards the theatrically engaged representation of people.

The images in this exhibition hypothetically return to that historical moment when non-people photographs are the predominant form of photographic expression and experimentation – this moment perhaps constitutes a photographic model (documentary photography in Paris around 1850). My own photographs are images of the conditions within our contemporary cities reconsidered as picture types through the example of this photographic milieu. “Documentary in style”, they are images of architecture, the street, foliage, vehicles, cultural objects – realist representations of the banal mutated urban site. What is contingent is the resistance of optimism, the residual trace of transience, the collective cultural erasure of both micro and macro histories.

A passage that I have often come back to when making my pictures can be found in Roland Barthes “Camera Lucida”;

In photographs I was combining two voices : the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows (studium)), and the voice of singularity ((punctum) emotion which belonged only to myself). It was as if I were seeking the nature of a verb which had no infinitive, only tense and probe.

As a short comment on the presentation of photographs I feel that there are of course many variable ways to exhibit pictures. The recent practice is to produce photographs that are large scale and framed. My own images are medium in scale and unframed. They are printed and spaced on both 16×20 and 20×24 sheet Kodak type c paper. As a mounting device I apply white tape adhesive. This method of presentation of course is just as valid as large scale framed photographs. I am unaware of any rules one should apply to the consideration of exhibiting photographs, however this clerical issue will exist as a problematic and unresolvable dispute. I think what is important when looking at images is essentially the image – however I do acknowledge the phenomenological argument that centres around experience. My own decision to exhibit these photographs as simply unframed raises the notion of the status of the print in recent photographic art, but also addresses economical limitations.