copyright
school research
university of hertfordshire
projects
field of vision
His Fine Art Research concerns are focused on the interface between drawing, photography and time based practices. He undertook an MA by Research in 2001 entitled 'Drawing, processes of conceptual modelling of landscape space' in which the inherent tensions between subjective, phenomenological readings and drawing conventions for depiction of phenomenon were examined. This research has subsequently developed into a concern with methods of intervention in spatial and narrative sequences. Recent outcomes have been large format digital prints, wall based installation and installation of books of digital prints and drawings, video documented performance.
He is currently involved with two ongoing collaborative projects:
Bread Matters and Field-of-vision.
Bread Matters:
uses Bread as a thematic vehicle for creative exchange and critical dialogue across media disciplines and cultural traditions. The events are structured around an exhibition of works, site specific installations and performances by artists from across East and west Europe. Papers are presented by artists, theoreticians, writers, curators and invited guest speakers. Symposia and exhibitions have taken place to date in Poland, Portugal and scheduled for Ireland in 2005 in collaboration with West Cork Arts centre under the aeges of Cork European Cultural capital, and under negotiation to transfer to New York 2006/7. http://www.breadmatters.org/BM/index.html
Field-of-Vision: examines our contemporary field of vision, the complex surfaces from which we read the world and how these surfaces deeply affect our perception of reality. These projects are international. The use of the internet is integral to the construction of both a virtual and concrete field and each project is realized as a live public event. The current public outcome of this project: http://www.field-of-vision.net began with an international call for submissions and the exhibition of a wall based billboard format collage in New York which has subsequently been reconstructed on the web.
Field of Vision Performance video sept 2004 New York Lab Gallery
The imagery documents two performances running as split screen companion narratives. The first performance is set in the environment on a shoreline, physically and metaphorically positioned at the edge of terrain, the subject undertakes an existential enactment… that of transcribing perceptions onto a picture plane.
The second performance takes place in the studio where, shut off from external stimulus, the gaze is turned inwards on the machinery of desire and the limitations of language.
The imagery of both narratives draws on historical and clichéd readings of the role of the artist as both performer and interpreter seeking to cohere perceptions and desire within a unified field. The performanc is in part earnest and part parody, underscoring the limitations and essential absurdity of the undertaking.
The process of drawing is enacted on a physical picture frame, functioning both as a restrictive window on the world and as a palimpsest for transcribing perceptions. The picture plane undergoes a process of signing, obliterating, repeating and reconfiguring in a vain attempt to assimilate perceptions and language. As the drawing accumulates it obscures vision, covering the view of the phenomenon with language, which must in turn be removed so as to re-perceive the original phenomenon.
The process enacts the role of language in replacing phenomenon with symbols reducing experience to an abstract and conceptual schema. The performance is resolved by the abandonment of the enterprise, acquiescing in the knowledge of the impossibility of reducing, through an accretion of gestures and signs, the complexity of consciousness to the one space and time of the picture plane.
In the studio
The performance in the studio continues an enactment of transcribing and deleting concepts on a suspended sheet of paper. The prevailing narrative is a reflection on the predisposition to hubris, projection and displacement. The response to the problem of habitual projection is to performatively invert the projection by applying the absurd solution of physically cutting a whole and bodily reversing the gaze through the picture plane.
The last sequence in the performance is an enactment of the problem of subjective desire interfering in the process of perception. Desire, simply expressed in the act of breathing fogs the lens, requiring the lens to be cleaned. The performance enacts our entrapment within the cyclical repetition.
Installation 2003 Gefahrliche Benutzeroberflechen/Hazardous Interfaces
Kunstverein, Neuenhaus, Germany (publication)
Book format Installation
The books developed from visual journals documenting observations on passing through Old and New Europe. The imagery records incidents which prompted speculative readings. What evolved without intension was a narration of the presence of old histories concluding in a visit to Majdanek work camp in Poland.
These journeys were followed by a visit to New York where I witnessed a Veterans Day March post 9/11. I subsequently documented the anti war marches in London. The Iraq conflict has progressed throughout the year and I documented in part the residual echoes of the conflict as they have settled like nuclear fall out, carried by media across continents and cultures, filtrating imagery into the fabric of remote domestic lives.
The imagery is drawn from observations of ethnic difference and focuses on individuals from the Islamic community in NW London. Issues of projection and enactment were narrated on a multi-racial estate through observations of children's play enacting scenes witnessed in the media.
The last book narrates a short journey between two streets on a sink estate in Liverpool. This economically and culturally maginalised community is now tied to events in Iraq through the presence of sons and partners in the armed forces serving in Iraq.
These books are not to be viewed as political propaganda or as linear narratives but as fragmentary documents of different cultural fields of vision.
In the Neuenhaus Installation 2003 the books were placed opposite each other so that viewers sat opposite eachother and were conscious of the opposite persons viewing of a different field of vision to the one they were observing. People were invited to make interventions in the books in the form of drawings and text.
In the Lab Gallery New York Installation 2004
The books are constructed of leaves opening outwards, by turning the leaves simultaneously possible correspondences and interpretive narratives are constructed by the viewer, depending on the way the viewer chooses to read the books, either randomly flicking through or following a linear sequence of reading.
'The impossibility of inhabiting another space'
Within the field-of-vision the relationship to the picture plane is axiomatic to the collaborative inquiry engaged with Alison Dalwood and Stephan Klimas. The modes and function of the picture plane are examined and enacted to understand emergent and potential functions. Of particular focus is the relationship between the convention of the painted, drawn, constructed picture plane and the digital, virtual picture plane.
The dominant contemporary cultural convention/mode of the picture plane is in the form of the television screen, computer monitor, printed photograph and bill board. Our contemporary relationship to the picture plane is dominated by the currency of the space/time configuration presented by linear time based narrative in film and further complicated by our interface with the internet. The social predominance of photography, film and the emergence of the internet as a virtual field has specific implications for understanding the potential functions of the picture plane both within a social context and within a formal context repositioning the perception of painting.
The picture plane is the plane of focus, functioning as the plane of transmission and exchange between the producer and the viewer. Exchange is two way in that the interpretation of the intent of the producer is dependent on the projected expectations of the viewer which in turn are dependent on the cultural convention, that is the field of vision inhabited by the viewer. The picture plane functions in this capacity as the interface between the projection of the producer and the projection of the cultural prejudices of the viewer audience.
The picture plane has phenomenological properties: As material surface, as reflective surface, as light projection, as colour field, as illusionistic space. It provoke conceptual readings as a plane of language, of signs, symbols. The picture plane is also the sight of emotional provocation, enactment and projection.
The picture plane has historically maintained multiple functions as a field/ plane of depiction and enactment, as both a physical plane holding a history of actions, held in/on a material surface, and as a virtual space. The picture plane is the plane of transition between material facture and conceptual space which is effectively reconstructed through the active projection of the viewer. In this sense the virtual space has no existence outside of the reading process and conceptual projection of the viewer.
In relation to the viewer, the gamut of potential phenomenological attributes of the picture plane can position the viewer's gaze within either an illusionistic space, as in a window onto a virtual space, corresponding to the prevailing convention of film and photography, or repel the viewer's projection back into the time and space they are inhabiting in the presence of the picture plane. In this sense the viewers gaze can be held in a state of tension between the illusionistic/conceptual space perceived to be within the picture plane and a reading of the picture plane as material object in concrete space, as an intervention within the space/time inhabited by the viewer.
The role of the frame or reflective surface on a picture plane presents a complex relationship between picture plane and viewer. A frame presents a window space through which the viewer views an illusionistic space. A reflective surface by contrast makes the viewer conscious of the material surface of the picture plane and its perception via the presence of light reflected or projected. By virtue of movement across the picture plane the viewer is induced to active conscious participation. As the viewer moves they perceive their own reflection or that of the surrounding space at a tangent to their gaze. The transparent reflective surface fulfils both a metaphorical and phenomenological function of being the conceptual and physical plane of transition between the concrete space of the viewer and the virtual, illusionistic space alluded to within the picture plane.
The picture plane is the site of reading of language, image and symbol, which are conventionally read as sitting on the surface of the picture plane, as printed text on a surface. An image is predominantly read spatially and perceived as a spatial configured trace, cast, representation of a fundamentally absent subject. The image seeks to form an equivalent spatial presence to an absent reality, in its similitude or equivalence to generate the emotional and intellectual response commensurate to the presence of the represented subject.
The picture plane as photograph can appear to be the imprint cast of a moment in time, we read it empathetically, through recollection inhabiting the illusion of the depicted space and time.
In drawing the picture plane can also form a palimpsest of accretions of actions, signs and gestures, which form a signing for or visual que for an equivalent presence. These accretions are performatively accumulated through time but are finally configured in the one time space of the picture plane. In this sense the painting, drawing process facilitates a condensation/ compression of actions/perceptions to the present time space of the picture plane, read as a history of thoughts and actions accumulated and fixed in the present time space of the viewers gaze.
In the case of time-based work the continuum of movement characterized by time based media represents an unfolding of a time-based narrative, only reaching realization with the completion of the time line of the narrative. Unedited film crudely corresponds to the experience of time experienced i.e. time unfolding in a linear time-line. Read through time the work is assimilated into consciousness and held by memory in the one time space of the consciousness of the viewer. However the mind does not necessarily hold time in a linear structure. Memory compresses and stretches time, selectively and subjectively editing and replaying experiences. Time based media can similarly be edited to form compression or stretching of time, playing with repetition, suspension, reiteration or reversal of a linear narrative, additionally through the use of multiple time lines, split screen or multiple projections generate simultaneous timelines.
The time/space relationship of the Internet is a time/space conundrum, inhabiting a virtual and effectual non-space in present time. The Internet exists as a phenomenon outside of the normal conception of a time space continuum, effectively on hold in a virtual space, capable of being recalled simultaneously into multiples of individual and collective space and time. The imagery on the Internet is held as if in suspension, seemingly inhabiting an infinite virtual space. It surfaces on recall, connecting back to the time/space of the inception of the image. It appears as an illusionistic echo, a reverberation from another time and space, a digital matrix transposed to a light projection into the space-time of the here and now of the viewer.
The construction of the site specific field-of-vision is a concretization or rather a temporary surfacing, a contingent and partial cast of the simultaneity and flux that is the collective field of vision, a concretization in actual time and space of the virtual time space flux of the internet. It is a collapse of the familiar picture plane convention of the artist maker projection meeting the viewer projection. The constructed field-of-vision enacts a more complex interface between individuals across time and space forming a temporary collective presence, a temporary materialization and configuration of the infinite permutations of the internet.
The constructed field of vision, while it holds no overt narrative and in effect is neutral, generates narratives by provoking the viewer into projecting their cultural readings onto the constructed field of vision. In this sense the constructed field of vision is subsumed into the viewers convention, into their field of vision. It is conceptually configured, rationalized and given meaning by the projected conventions of the viewer. A documentary image imbedded in the constructed field will be lifted from its neutral status and given meaning by the cultural prejudice of the viewer. In this sense the field of vision can only reflect back to the viewer their own projected cultural field of vision.
The purpose of the field is to generate reflection on the cultural machinery of image production, to make conscious to the viewer that any potential narrative perceived to be held in the constructed field of vision exists not only through the manipulative intent of the producers but by virtue of their active projection of a culturally conditioned and habitual narrative reading. In this sense the constructed field of vision is dependent on being site specific and is in consequence reconfigured by cultural location.
Selected Exhibitions solo * /duo**/ trio***/ group
2004
***Installation Field of Vision: New York, Suitcase Series Lab Gallery, New York
2003
Digital print installation 10 Jahre, 50 Kunstler Kunstverein, Neuenhaus, Germany (catalogue)
2003
Digital prints Bread Matters II ' Symposium and exhibition, Museum of Water Lisbon Portugal
2003
***Installation Gefahrliche Benutzeroberflechen/Hazardous Interfaces Kunstverein, Neuenhaus, Germany (publication)
2002
Installation and digital prints ‘Though the Surface’ Stara Gallery Lublin
2001
***'Paintings and Drawings Research into Practice' Exhibition and Conference Faculty Gallery, University of Hertfordshire
2001
Digital prints, Gallerie Periferic
Amsterdam
2000
Photographs and presentation of a paper, Bread Matters' Symposium and exhibitionTheatre NN Lublin Poland
2000
'Full Duplex' Gallerie Periferic
Amsterdam
1999
drawings and computer prints Gallerie Periferic Amsterdam
1999
** Paintings and Drawing Bury Art Gallery and Museum
1999
**Paintings Raikalla Art Gallery Kankaanpaa, Finland.
1997
** Paintings, Bury Art Gallery and Museum
1996
Paintings Reed's Wharf gallery
1995
**Paintings and drawings, St. martin in the Fields Gallery London
1995
Drawings Rietveld Institute. Amsterdam, Holland.
Publications
2004
Digital Photography, New York: Hylas Publishing. ISBN: 1592580645
2003
Step by Step Digital Photography, Ilex Press. ISBN: 1904705111
2000
Design and publication of Catalogue of work 'Bread Matters' Symposium and exhibition Theatre NN Lublin Poland
2000
Introduction for publication catalogue of work Dutch Artist Henriette vant'Hoog
2001
publication catalogue of work of British Artist David Seaton
1999
'In Parallel' A limited edition of Paintings and Poems written by Deirdre Shanahan in response to viewing 20 recent paintings
1995
'Introduction to Mixed Media’ Publishers. Dorling kindersley in association with the Royal Academy of arts.
1993
'Introduction to Pastels.' Publishers. Dorling kindersley in association with the Royal Academy of arts.
1987
'Five British Artists' Publication of prints. Bunyan Press.