All the Things Between : photography and video from Europe and North America

Abstract

Exhibition Dates: 13 – 26 June 2008; Inter Art Gallery, Sevenstar Main Street, 798 ArtZone, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing / China Curator: Alison Dalwood Contributing artists to the exhibition: Alison Dalwood, Stephan Hausmeister, Sam Jury, Timothy Van Laar, Isidro L-aparicio, Stefan Sulzer, Sebastian Utzni, Michael Wright My contribution to the exhibition was a series 9 images of re-photographed collages where images or museum spaces were overlaid with semi-transparent material and photographed, enlarged and mounted and sealed under Perspex (Diasec mounted). This work is from my sustained exploration of photographic and visual perception—the nature of light, vision and perception and the activity of looking. The work's pictorial content is repressed by photographing the subject indirectly so that details are not apparent and thus effectively ridding the photograph of a principal subject and so drawing attention to the conditional nature of perception and the consciousness of the viewer. The subject of my research is perception itself and exists not in the object but in a way of seeing which is prompted by the image combined with the surface reflection. Alte Nationalegalerie, simultaneously employ the window and the mirror, longstanding tropes of Western Art, to destabilize the works’ relation to site and place, a constant concern that runs through my research where the picture becomes architecture or environment so questioning traditional systems of pictorial function. The pictorial devices employed mediate and filter raw experience bringing into question our perception of reality in a digital age. I question how to make the viewer aware of his agency in looking and how viewer, object and museum can be perceived as occupying the same space. The works situate photography in a dialogue with the history of painting and in relation to architectural space, both real and represented, thus overturning conventional uses of photography and presenting an alternative method of representing and analyzing the structures of reality. All the Things Between was an exhibition of photography and video work showcasing eight artists from Europe and North America, each with a compelling and radical approach to photography or video. The exhibition explored the phenomena of photography as an all-encompassing mediator of reality and imagination in our contemporary world. Collectively the artists share a dialogue that gives visual form to questions about our expectation of realism and the reading of imagery in the age of globalization.