Output details

This Will Kill That. Mixed-media, installation/solo exhibition.

This exhibition, in conjunction with Christine Clinckx’s Seven Days, marked my long-standing association with the Dagmar de Pooter Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium from 1995 - 2009. http://dagmardepooter.wix.com/gallery. The title of this exhibition makes reference to Denis Hollier’s essay, Surrealist Precipitates – Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows (1994). Hollier references Victor Hugo’s declaration via Zola, deflected and reinterpreted in relation to notions of obsolescence, materiality and return. The essay highlights Surrealism’s identification with photography for what it perceives as a shift from the descriptive or pictorial function to a performative realm.

The installation comprised several interrelated artworks including four large photographic transparencies displayed in lightboxes. Each lightbox image depicts four locations, which are at once familiar, but could be found anywhere, a deserted gymnasium, red-roofed suburban houses, the deck of a wind-swept ferry at sea, and an empty plot of land amidst an industrial cityscape.

Two carousel slide projectors were loaded with eighty 35mm slides. The sequence of projected images presented a selection of found images where time, place and memory manifest an anti-narrative, which displaces their origin as vernacular photographic images. The sequence of projected still images in movement reveals moments of contingency with their static counterparts elsewhere in the gallery. Other works which formed part of the installation included a 19th century painting by G. Gelling which depicts ships at sea in stormy weather and a lithograph print of a found photograph of a seagull in flight.

The context of this work is allied to those practices, which have been recovered by artists who investigate obsolete forms of technological and photographic reproduction. This installation highlighted the structural formation of the artwork, materiality of the image and their experience by the viewer.