Part 4/4 : Diary of Friday, January 23rd 2015
Photo50: ‘Against Nature’
Today, we took time to visit Photo50, the Fair’s annual showcase of contemporary photography. For this year’s exhibition, the Fair’s direction wished to invite a curator and to offer a unique theme. Entitled ‘Against Nature’, it has been curated by Sheyi Bankale of Next Level Projects, who told us more about his project.
« The framework of the exhibition Against Nature is positioned as a series of questions that consider what happens when routine and/ or tradition is disrupted to re-interpret photographic practices as an act, intervention or object. With these questions as a point of departure, the exhibition demonstrates the unique characteristics and expressive potential of various techniques used by the artists to produce images as objects. All of the represented artists in this exhibition began as photographers and collectively respond to the notion that photography is a material medium. They reveal the continuing interrelationship of a wide variety of techniques transformed into actual space and dimension, thereby shifting photography into objects.
Against Nature challenges the critical separation between ’traditional photography’, which seeks to mirror external reality by evoking an emotional response to the image and our perceptions as agents of ‘traditional photography’ to understand the potential for altering the photographic form. The exhibition provides a sense of the immense range of the medium of photography showing artists that through their own innermost enthusiasm have responded to selective techniques to deliver revealing viewpoints and practices.
The narrative of the exhibition pivots on the novel Against Nature by Joris Karl Huysmans suggesting a spatial experience aligned with reflections on the function of images and representation. Here, Against Nature occupies an appropriated role to narrate upon a variety of inherent construction and installation of relational photography. Placing the exhibition’s emphasis to allow the photographic physicalities to explore the possibilities of how we relate to and furnish new ways of interpreting an intrinsic sense of objecthood.
Fundamentally, the central role of this exhibition is to critically record the function of images in a fashion emblematic to an internet-like structure. The way knowledge of a generation is sourced through a spectacle of questions. Google a question and what is received is a labyrinth of answers. »
By visiting the exhibition, the works by Darren Harvey-Regan has focused our attention. This artist playfully experiments with the nature of photography and its relationship to the material world.
« My work frequently considers three primary elements of the photographic process – a subject (the thing in the world), the image (the photographic representation, the picture) and the photographic object (the material photograph itself, the paper object, be it mounted, framed or frameless) – and emphasizing or creating overlaps between them. These can be a playful interplays or considered encounters, swapping roles or perception of these elements around to create an ambiguity over exactly how things might be seen. I like the idea of things being in a state of movement, one way or another depending on ones current thought or perspective.
The project ‘Beauties Of The Common Tool’ started with Walker Evans’ Beauties of The Common Tool, a commission for Fortune magazine in 1955. Evan’s series is a prime historic exemplar of photography transitioning towards an accepted art form as well as the beginnings of the mediums’ usage in considering the seemingly banal and commonplace: in Evan’s case, the overlooked beauty inherent in everyday form. Using Evan’s images online, I first collaged his tool images together to make new forms and am now recreating these digital constructs in reality through sourcing matching tools, cutting them in half and rejoining them to emulate my digital montages. I especially like the reversal of photographic trajectory this entails: where photography typically starts with something material and makes an image of it, here I have started with preexisting images and made something material from them. »
Darren Harvey-Regan
www.harveyregan.com
Exhibiting artists: Jonny Briggs, Thorsten Brinkmann, Julio Galeote, Hassan Hajjaj, Adad Hannah, Darren Harvey Regan, Nikolai Ishchuk, Andrew Lacon and Tom Lovelace.
INFORMATIONS
London Art Fair
21-25 January 2015
58 White Lion Street
N1 9PP London
United Kingdom
+44 (0)20 7288 6736
[email protected]
http://www.londonartfair.co.uk/exhibiting
http://voies-off.com
