Output details

Messages

Curated group of work from the first twenty years of the project-wide investigation of the landscape. These early photographic works take on the attempt to disengage photography from its apparent subject matter. A series of questions were asked in relationship to the dialogue between object and subject and across time. Can the process of making contemporary art be connected and examined visually through time and separate works? How do the art-historical notions of modernity and its immediate precedents be revealed through the making of new work in the landscape? In what way does Kant’s idea of the beautiful and sublime carry through the art-historical tradition of making? How does the lineage of makers resound through the examination of their work? The investigative methods, were based on the fields of photography and art history. A series of responses of the interiorised landscape, were made in response to art-historical provocations that spanned from the late 20th century back through to the early 19th century that were quantified as messages. Each picture was made in a structurally enclosed field as a critical response to aspects of making that were identifiable through the practice of modernism and it’s early precedence. The importance of the body of work was inclusively acknowledged by the Chairman of the TATE Photography Committee, the Curator of Photography of the TATE and the Curator of TATE Britain and the Curator of the V&A.”Messages” is one of the earliest bodies of photographic work that insisted upon the subject of the work being about picture-making rather than the simple delineation of the external objects to the camera. The show establishes (peripherally) but firmly the contribution of photography to the Land Art Movement and to its intrinsic relationship with drawing.