Here - The Hold Artspace

FOR
WANT
OF A
BETTER
WORD
25 OCTOBER - 4 NOVEMBER
This exhibition catalogue documents For Want
of a Better Word, a group exhibition held at The
Hold Artspace featuring David Chatfield, Emma
Leslie, Felix Merry and Sarah Oxenham.
For Want of a Better Word opened on 25
October 2013 and continued until 4 November
2013.
Front cover
David Chatfield Untitled, 2013
Over page
Felix Merry Feel free to rename
me after purchase, 2013
Next page
Sarah Oxenham iView, 2013
Luke Kidd & Kylie Spear
0414 441 922
www.theholdartspace.com
[email protected]
Level 2, 274 Montague Road
West End Q 4101
PHOTOGRAPHY
SANS PHOTOGRAPHY
By Cameron Hope
If there is one central problem being examined by the works in this
exhibition, it is how to answer the question implied by its title: For Want
of a Better Word. We cannot call this photography – David Chatfield’s
reflective pond; Emma Leslie’s brick wallpaper; Felix Merry’s spraypainted mosaic; Sarah Oxenham’s snapshot kaleidoscope – because
each work is an instance in which ‘photography’ tells us nothing about
the work. Each artist has responded with a cogent investigation of
where photography fails and what that 'better word' could be.
At the heart of the exhibition is a response to the way photography’s
digitisation has changed our means of relating to images. Digital
photography has made image-making and image-sharing ubiquitous,
but the cost of photography’s ubiquity – its quotidian familiarity - is its
anonymity. The artists in this show have attempted to represent the
flip-side of a familiar coin, together dismantling our familiarity with digital
‘photography’, thereby creating a space for a new and better word to
emerge.
Felix Merry’s work in the last year has sought to draw the viewer’s
attention to specific components of the digital image. Here, with Now
that I’m a painter... would you model nude for me? Merry has enlarged
an image to an impossible scale, frustrating our want or expectation, for
a photorealistic picture.
This page: Emma Leslie I wish these pillars were brick, 2013
Next page: Felix Merry Now that I'm a painter... would you model nude for
me?, (analogue photograph courtesy of the artist) 2013
To create the work, Merry digitally manipulated the colourspace of an
analogue photo. He converted analogue to digital which pixelated the
image; he then imported the colour pallete of a spray paint company
(Squirts), matching each pixel to a tone of paint they produce. From
there, it was a matter of ‘painting by numbers’. Each cardboard panel, a
7” pizza box, is painted individually, and so cuts itself off from the whole;
yet even when taken together, there is no discernible image to be
made out.
Merry’s work reflects a fundamental difference between analogue and
digital photography. In the former, a reproduction is usually created by
exposing light-sensitive paper to a negative; in the latter it is created
by printing (or, in this case, spraying) colour pigment onto a surface.
Analogue photography is, therefore, more attentive to the literal
definition of the word photo(light)graphy(writing) than digital.
Merry has shown that digital photography is not lightwriting but
colourwriting; digital images are written in a quantifiable, manipulable,
mathematical language. Colour is a language that can be easily
translated, from the colourspace of photoshop to the colourspace of a
spray-paint manufacturer, but these translations occur at a microscopic,
pixel-by-pixel, level. As such, the image risks being lost in this
translation.
Felix Merry Now that I'm a painter... would you
model nude for me?, (detail) 2013
If the cost of digital photography’s ubiquity is its anonymity, this
exhibition implies that the uniqueness of the context of the art gallery
can be used to bring attention to this fact (the art gallery is the new
street lamp-post, plastered over with “MISSING” flyers). Merry achieves
this by zooming in to the point of abstraction and disorientation, but
David Chatfield’s work offers an experience of clear and patient
observation.
Chatfield’s three works, all Untitled, create a space of self-awareness
and meditation. Walking around the room, viewers are likely the catch
themselves in the light of one of the three projectors, casting shadows
on wall that contrast starkly with the projected images. Meanwhile, each
footstep is registered as a vibration by an inch-deep pool of water, the
ripples upon which diffuse and wobble an image that has been reflected
onto the wall off the water’s surface.
It is telling that the works in Chatfield’s Untitled series are, themselves,
of water. Surely, this can be read as a play on words – converting the
colloquialism ‘photostream’ into a literalism – but instead these works
critique our expectations of imagery with regards to time. Especially,
they challenge the endlessness of memory and reverie, insisting on a
circular structure that opposes listlessness.
This page: David Chatfield Untitled II, 2013
Next page: David Chatfield Untitled, (detail) 2013
Chatfield plays with the ambiguity of the image plane, keen to explore
what this ambiguity can open up. In Untitled (wet), the image is
projected onto a plane of water, which is in turn focussed against the
wall. The apparatus of this artwork is effectively a camera obscura, as
an inverted image comes from the projector which is then re-inverted in
being reflected by the water. The image is focussed on the wall in the
way camera obscurae focus their image on paper to be sketched.
In another Untitled work, we see a orange-tinted image of an ocean.
However, juxtaposed against the horizon line of the work is a black,
painted rectangle, which shatters the mimetic, recessive space of the
image plane and brings the viewer’s awareness to the gallery space, and
the wall on the image is projected. We are unable to view the scene with
a sense of abandon, i.e. with ‘rose-tinted glasses’.
The effect of Chatfield’s work, enhanced by its position behind a dark
curtain in one room of The Hold, is that we are aware of how long we
spend contemplating each single image. This speaks to the underlying
theme of the exhibition because it implies a comparison to how little
time we spend on everyday images. Chatfield’s Untitled series strikes
us as different from how we ordinarily interact with digital photography
precisely because its point is the viewer’s awareness of their looking.
David Chatfield Untitled, 2013
It is little wonder we don’t pause to reflect on each image we see, so
saturated is contemporary life with digital imagery. Hundreds of millions
of images are uploaded to the internet each day. And these images
are made with digital cameras so advanced that there is not a red-eye,
blurry foreground, over or underexposure among them. This makes the
digital images we stream through each day incredibly transparent – what
you see is what you get.
When we treat images as transparent in this way, we see through their
material and technological conditions. Photography becomes so familiar
that we reel through images like we’re playing SNAP! Sarah Oxenham’s
work Saccades recreates this experience, with images scrolling across
our eyes faster than we can take each one in, much like the light-posts
lining the highway that flash past our car windows. These are saccades,
the eye’s rapid movement between discrete points.
The work parodies how we tend to view photographs in contexts such
as Instagram, usurping a reel of disparate images and playing it back to
us with enough time only to gleam each one’s vaguest details. Saccades
is a dizzying visual experience made all the more dizzying by the fact
that the viewer has no control over these saccades - we can never call
SNAP!
With hundreds of millions of new images available every day, we haven’t
time to digest to dissect each one, to reflect and pause and cogitate on
what each image says and, more importantly, what language it says it in.
In another of Oxenham’s works, iView, the artist makes this language the
subject of the work. Shot through the window of a plane on a standard
iPhone, this work shows us the impossibility of capturing the speed of
contemporary life; we get, as a result of the camera’s failure, a ghostly
sense of stillness.
We have witnessed, in the last ten years, a technology race in
photographic equipment. Cameras have become better yet cheaper;
easier yet smaller. Our happy snap cameras now boast more than 20
megapixels, and our mobile phones shoot 1080p video. But it has
been found that 20/20 vision is equivalent to about 16 megapixels, and
sees at about 60 frames per second, so what happens to all that extra
information? Digital technology, just like the human eye, is subject to its
own failures and limitations. Oxenham’s iView brings this to the surface,
creating a short, mesmeric video that stages the failure of modern
technology.
Sarah Oxenham Waverly Flemmish, 2013
Despite the technological sophistication of camera, it produces an
illusion – the blades of the propeller appear impossibly curvilinear,
shuttering in the foreground while the backdrop slides by. The camera
produces its own language; one of fluidity and impossible angles, which
contrasts neatly against the matter-of-fact colour language of Merry’s
cardboard tiles.
Arguably, the illusion in iView is a result of the multiple refractions of
the many lenses in between the viewer and the scene the video has
captured. The window of the plane acts as a lens; there is a lens in the
camera; one in the projector; one, even, in each eye of the beholder.
Perhaps it is the case that no image can survive being translated and
transmitted so many times.
Oxenham has staged this fact in Waverly Flemish, European Cathedral
(Discontinued), Large Hammered, Narrow Reeded and Waterglass, with
the title of each of these works coming from the name of the glass that
sits between the image and the viewer. Each piece of glass serves a
lens through which the image behind cannot pass unaltered. Titling
each work after the lens, rather the image ‘behind’ them, draws further
attention to the fact that images are bound, inextricably, to lenses.
These types of glass may seem familiar to residents of Queensland;
they appear often in Queenslander housing as a form of privacy glass,
which reveals something about what is behind it, but withholds just as
much. In Oxenham’s work, the viewer is challenged in their expectation
of photography to be revelatory and pensive, echoing Chatfield’s work’s
interest in constantly refreshing the viewer’s awareness of time and
place.
Again, these works stage a type of failure. Oxenham’s works are
themselves un-photographable. To subject them to further lenses
would lose what they are. As Richard Prince proved – when he rephotographed and enlarged cigarette advertisements for display in
the art gallery – photography as we know it is nothing if not infinitely
reproducible. What you see is what you get and photography of this
sort can hop across contexts without the contents of the reproduction
undergoing significant change; the image remains more or less, same.
Oxenham’s works refuse this quality of reproducibility; they are not
photography because they cannot be photographed.
This page: Sarah Oxenham European Cathedral (discontinued), 2013
Next page: Sarah Oxenham Narrow Reeded, 2013
Emma Leslie’s practice developed with a hands-on approach to
analogue photographic means. In her This is... series (2012), the artist
created photograms from light-sensitive paper, exploring the tactility of
the medium of photography to produce works that echoed traditional
photography’s semi-sculptural presence. With her graduation from
Queensland College of Arts in 2012, and the loss of access to many of
these materials, her work has begun to explore photography in its digital
incarnation.
The works in this show are a response to the disquieting ubiquity
of digital photography, and the cross-pollination of processes it has
brought about. In The Selfie, the artist has created a digital echo of
the analogue process, recouping ‘the negative’ image, which occurs
organically in the creation of an analogue photograph; here, the negative
is a patent fake. Accordingly, it is printed as a fake – a digital print onto
stretched canvas – further highlighting the artifice of digital photography,
and painting the (mis)appropriation of canvas by photography, literally, in
a negative light.
Leslie’s work highlights all that all is faux in digital photography.
And, while this is not done as nostalgic lament, or as a cry for an
anachronistic return to analogue photography, the works push upon us
tricky questions as to how far we will let digital photography serve as
a stand-in for something real. Leslie’s work highlights the fictive nature
digital photography to question how much of nature we will let digital
culture make fictive.
Certainly, Leslie’s work illustrates that fiction allows us to entirely
reengineer space. Certain impossibilities become possible. Barcelona
Chair (Substitute) for example, allows the artist to recreate the famous
chair, despite the fact she’s never seen a real one. The chair was
designed for an expo in 1929, but Leslie’s use of photography has
transposed it to Brisbane, 2013. In I wish these pillars were brick, the
impossibility of replacing the wooden pillars in the gallery space with
brick ones is answered with a simple pasting over of wallpaper.
This page: Emma Leslie The Selfie, 2013
Next page: Emma Leslie Barcelona Chair (Substitute), 2013
Importantly, Leslie’s works do nothing to hide their faux-ness. I wish
these pillars were brick, for example, clashes two mutually exclusive
ideas: the pillars, as we see, are round, but the wallpaper covering
them is of rectangular bricks. Barcelona Chair, on the other hand, is a
cardboard box – not a chair that would bare sitting on. By highlighting
the fakery at play here, Leslie argues that photography can never standup as a stand-in.
Leslie’s other work, A4, serves as a sort of synthesis of her
investigations into digital photography. An enlarged print of an A4 piece
of paper, the work is a white monochrome. In representing nothing, A4,
and her work in this exhibition more broadly, refrains from nostalgia
over analogue photography. The blank page is digital photography –
reminiscent of Merry’s work – by which the image plane is ready to be
filled with colour.
We find ourselves in want of a better word than photography to describe
the work in this show. Photography is now is a matter of choosing
images: we choose our profile picture, our wedding photos, we choose
when to make photos but the machine makes the image for us. The
work in this exhibition is concerned with making images, signalling a
return to the question “how was this made?” as opposed to “why was
this shown?”
For Want of a Better Word deconstructs digital photography, questioning
if it can withstand close, artistic, scrutiny, or whether ‘photography’
crumbles under this exacting gaze. This is not photography as we know
it; these works require time, spatial interaction and reflection. We are
both in want, and in need, of a better word.
Emma Leslie A4, 2013