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Size: 37.5 x 109 x 22 (width x height x depth)
Medium: Other Photograph
Price: Contact Dagmar De Pooter Gallery
Exhibition History: PRESS RELEASE
Cian Quayle (Great Britain)
"Interzone"
25 January 2008- 08 march 2008
Cian Quayle is an artist, lecturer and writer based in the UK. Photography based installations investigate time, place and memory and incorporate vernacular forms of the medium. Previous work has explored the notion of artist-travel and exile alongside archival strategies of Photoconceptual art practice. Quayle recently curated Transmission at The Arts Gallery, University of the Arts London and lectures in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Chester.
Interzone
The images featured in this exhibition are drawn from two ongoing, parallel series of photographic artworks, which explore the cinematic potential of the urban landscape. These photographic images document everyday spaces of work, retail and leisure, which trace a series of ‘micro-journeys’ undertaken on foot, by bus and bicycle. The register of these images is ‘as found’, although a set of formal and social concerns have established themselves as a structure for recognition. The visibility of these spaces is initially rooted in a ‘passing glimpse’, or has been noted during repeated visits to the same site. This might involve the daily practice of buying a pint of milk, playing a game of pool or going to the laundry.
Formally they operate in two distinct registers in their individual display of similar characteristics: The lighting conditions are usually mixed but predominantly artificially-lit by fluorescent light. As such it is difficult to distinguish whether these locations have been photographed by day or at night. They are also familiar as places of communal use and gathering and as a result are subject to surveillance by CCTV cameras and mirrors. This gaze is returned in the point of view of the camera, which has registered these images in a semi-oblique, perspectival trajectory, which plunges towards an unseen vanishing point. The subject focus or loci within each image is confused in an overwhelming array of visual detail. Perspectival-depth flattens out as abstract form and colour draws the eye across the surface of the picture plane. These images mark a changeover of ‘place’ to ‘space’, measured by perspective driven vectors of direction, velocity and time variables, which accentuate a sense of dislocation and out of placeness which could be anywhere.
The colour transparencies are counterpointed by the deep graphic clarity of large black and white photographic prints. These images allude to Roland Barthes notion of the filmic. A vacant overgrown plot provides a point of intersection between inside and outside which introduces the pastoral or an idea of landscape within, or often the kind of spaces found on the periphery or at the edge of the city. Thamesmead Estate in South East London was part of the 1960s utopian Modernist dream built at the edge of Erith Marshes in 1962. This location was also used by Stanley Kubrick in Clockwork Orange (1971) where a vision of the future foreshadows the reality of Thamesmead and other deprived parts of London in the midst of the next phase of redevelopment and regeneration heralded by London’s successful Olympic bid. Conversely, close-by to Thamesmead, Maryon Park in Woolwich was where Michelangelo Antonioni filmed Blow Up (1966). Both films follow the trajectory of an elliptical journey by a protagonist who undergoes a psychological transformation but is ultimately returned to the same point of departure. Absence and place, space and movement, sight and vision are not simply illustrated by sight but by the reflexive process of their formation, which generates a set of relations between image, event and representation, author and viewer, original and copy, familiar and unfamiliar. They reference iconic cinematic set-pieces filmed in London or bear the suggestion of opening, establishing and closing shots in cinema. As a series of ‘optical artefacts’ they form an archive of the mobility of the city and the immersive social experience of lacking a place.
Cian Quayle
January 2008
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