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Interzone: solo exhibition

The Dagmar de Pooter Gallery was established in 1995 and I have exhibited in group and solo exhibitions since the gallery opened. The exhibition forms part of parallel series of exhibitions, which the gallery runs across two levels, and Interzone was exhibited in conjunction with Yves Beaumont’s The Private Territories. The photographic artworks exhibited were drawn from two ongoing series of artworks, which explore the cinematic potential of landscape and city spaces.

Two large colour transparencies were counterpointed by the two large black and white hand-made prints. Each series features everyday spaces of work, retail and leisure. A vacant overgrown plot introduces the pastoral, or an idea of landscape, within the environs of the city, or often the type of spaces found on the periphery of the city. Thamesmead Estate in South East London was designed as part of the 1960s Modernist dream of utopian architecture, built at the edge of Erith Marshes in 1962. This location was featured in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971). The film and novel represent a dystopian vision of the future which foreshadows the reality of Thamesmead and other impoverished parts of London in the midst of the next phase of regeneration following London’s successful Olympic bid.

Conversely, Maryon Park in Woolwich was the key setting for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and both films follow an elliptical journey undertaken by each film’s main protagonist. Each character undergoes a psychological transformation but is ultimately returned to the same point of departure. These images reference Roland Barthes notion of the filmic in The Third Meaning (1971). They also bear the suggestion of establishing or closing shots in cinema. As a series of ‘optical artefacts’ they form an archive of the mobility of the city and the immersive social experience of lacking a place.