Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
The Printed Reality
The Printed Reality was an exhibition of photographic works by seven different artists from the group, selected by Laidler and presented within a gallery installation setting at the IMPACT Conference, Bristol (16-19 September 2009). Laidler created the international online group The Printed Reality in 2009, curating the work of its 94 members via Flickr as a means of documenting the ways in which people interact with the printed image in their daily lives and as a way of addressing collaboratively the challenges posed by Photography 2.0 in the printing and exhibition of images.
As a way of engaging with the photographic image in an electronic age, the exhibition eschewed conventional hanging and framing methods by projecting the images onto a three square metre section of wall in the gallery against which had been placed a series of wide-format prints of the wall itself mounted on rectangular card panels. The structure was designed so that the real (3D) and the reproduced (2D) wall interacted in the viewer’s perception of the images, thus encouraging audiences to think about the challenges presented by digitally mediated artefacts to museums and galleries. More generally, the exhibition explored how the pervasive presence of two-dimensional images is supplanting or mediating our interaction with the physical world and thus challenging conceptions of the real and the fabricated in what Baudrillard posits as the ‘universe of signs’. Laidler has analysed the exhibition in the Journal of the California Society of Printmakers (2011).
The exhibition was developed from ‘The Roombeek Series’ of photographic artworks by Laidler that were selected for the 84th International Photography competition at The Print Center, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (May - July 2010). Laidler’s exhibited work was published in an e-catalogue and is part of The Philadelphia Print Center’s collection.
