Lightlines@Abbey Walk Gallery 2014
Mnemonic # 1 and The Lightstain Series
Triple projection, Wood, Glass, Mirror, Sound, 2015
Dimensions: 3m h x 5m w x 5m d approx.
Duration: Variable
26 C-type photographic prints mounted in reclaimed domestic frames
Dimensions: 70cm h x 50cm w each approx.
Developed from wider considerations of the interplay between person and place, how it is understood, analysed, or indeed, constructed through art making, Lightlines is a contemplation on how art-making may probe some of the complexities of the relation between the affective potentials of image and the agency of the person. Working with ideas of the conscious and the unconscious and the ways in which sight and site impact upon the mind and body space of the viewer, Lightlines explores ideas of encounter and affect through still and moving image.
Setting up a dialogue between the works The Lightstain Series, a collection of photographic works exploring the hidden resonances of interior domestic space, and Mnemonic, a moving image installation which re-presents the images as abstracted forms, the presentation considers memory and recollection as a complex interplay of encounter and remembrance.
Operating discretely and in tandem, the surreal perspectives of still images are manipulated, cut through, sliced, reflected and refracted, into multiply layered, multiply projected light forms in Mnemonic, echoing the ways in which memory and the psyche stores, recalls and re-imagines experience. Mnemonic works with ideas of thin slicing – the photographic image is a thin slice of space as well as time echoing the ways in which the mind stores and recalls perceptual information as conflated incidences of significance – to play with ideas of recollection as a collage of image and affects operative in the conscious and unconscious.
Lightlines probes the familiar/strange relation operative in the proposal of the uncanny to explore the ways in which perceptual stimuli is absorbed and assimilated into new configurations and forms which may be read in infinite variety by the viewer towards a changed relation.
The uncanny resonances manifest through the still images of The Lightstain Series become confused and conflated in Mnemonic through ideas of repetition and change, as the peculiar imagery of the stills is presented as an abstracted collage of colour and light. Rhythm, metre and patterning of image and sound play out as an evolving feedback loop, as the work sets into motion ever changing configurations of visual and aural stimuli.
In doing so, Lightlines engages with the ways in which the mind and the psyche operate in tandem to facilitate recognition and recollection while acknowledging the slippery relation between remembering/forgetting, the known/unknown, and the conscious/unconscious capacities of the viewer.
In effect, the disturbances of the stills imagery are resolved through the proposal of a changed relation, brought about by placing the imagery in motion in ways which echo the operative nature of affect as a moment on moment apprehension of perceptual stimuli continually augmented over time.
