Courtesy of Flowers Gallery
Out of Obscurity
Flowers
Gallery, LONDON Kingsland Road
2 July – 3
September 2016
Flowers Gallery
is pleased to announce the first chapter of a two-part group exhibition
focusing on abstraction within contemporary photography. Out of Obscurity presents a speculative journey in
response to the series of cloud studies produced in the 1920s by Alfred
Stieglitz titled Equivalents. From the disorienting
perspectives of aerial photography to physical manipulation of photography’s
material properties, the exhibition draws together visions of the sky produced
by a range of international artists.
The horizon
line, seen here as a subjective or symbolic point of contact between two
distinct spaces, forms an initial seam running through the exhibition. On the Clouds by Boomoon, taken from a plane at
high altitude, presents the dividing line between sky and cloud as though at
eye-level, forming an ‘absolute horizon’, which Boomoon considers to lead to
the realm of infinity. Also from an aerial viewpoint, the flattened frontal
aspect and dizzying perspective of Edward Burtynsky’sPhosphor
Tailings navigates a narrow path between form and content. What
appears to be the sky mirrored in a lake below is revealed as the vivid hues of
toxic algae blooms generated by phosphorous mining. The image functions, from
Burtynsky’s viewpoint, as a reflecting pool of our times, seducing the eye to
the surface and immersing the viewer in painterly details of line, shape
and colour
A sensitivity to
both surface and material can be seen in many of the exhibiting artists,
manifesting in images that are interrupted, deconstructed and re-assembled
through both digital and analogue processes.Alliance by
Chloe Sells, which captures the atmospheric patterns of birds flocking to the
flooded plains of the Okavango Delta in North-Western Botswana, is constructed
from two images overlaid on an irregularly shaped photographic print,
offsetting the chance effects produced by chemical manipulation in the darkroom
with the organic decay and transience of nature. Chris McCaw directly harnesses
the power of the sun’s rays to scorch traces onto light sensitive paper
negatives. His Heliograph series explores the
effects of multiple exposures of the sun’s path, conflating the indelible
records of time and place, and forming an indexical relationship between the
subject and its representation. Letha Wilson brings the image and the sensory
effects of the rugged desert landscape together by subjecting her photographs
to sculptural processes. Corrugating, splicing and shuttering the photographic
prints, Wilson also pours concrete into their ridges and folds, blurring the
lines between photography and sculpture, representation and abstraction. An
intersection of horizontal and vertical planes is present in the evocative and
minimal work Colour Filter for a Utopian Sky by
Wang Ningde. Graduating between the cool sunrise tones of turquoise and pink,
the original representation of the sunset is deconstructed and reconfigured in
three dimensions as an abstracted and inverted photographic image.
John Maclean
applies a reductive process in his series Outhinking the Rectangle.
In the work Container Ships, Horizon and Sky,
Maclean digitally removes all but the most minimal information to evoke the
sensation of a sunset in a sequence of graduated lines. In the work of Julie
Cockburn, sculptural or physical manipulation can be seen equally as a process
of embellishment and erasure. In Happenstance, a
blizzard-like atmosphere is achieved through scratching away the photographic
emulsion from found photographs, and is further masked by protruding
hand-embroidered spheres.
Seeking
abstraction in the man-made urban environment, Randy West photographs the
spaces between the New York skyline observed during his daily walks in the
city. In New York Sky, buildings are thrown into sharp relief in
the long shadows cast by the September evening light, causing the negative
space to form an impression of inverse skyscrapers.
Shifting both perspective and magnitude, Michael Benson’s US Cloud Sheet pictures cloud formations over the
coastline of New York State, rendered from satellite data sent back to earth
from space. Within this alien viewpoint of the landscape, Benson creates a
counter image to the view Stieglitz captured almost a century before, extending
the scope of the abstracted photograph through advancements in science
and technology.
http://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/view/out-of-obscurity
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