Brooklyn
neighborhoods are pockmarked with building sites. Required to display details
of what is under construction, many sites also present a computer-generated
visualisation of the building to come: glass walls under clear blue skies.
These visions of gentrification rely on distanced observation. Up close, the
blues of the sky and its windowed reflections become noisy, dirty, blotched.
Their visions are stained by the life they attempt to suppress.
Alan Greig is a writer,
photographer and video-maker based in Brooklyn. He explores the use of visual
media to disrupt regimes and codes of social control, working between representation and abstraction, motion and stillness, surface and
interface. Against the algorithmic operations and programmed visions of surveillance capitalism, he is interested in what control cannot
control, i.e. in control’s visual remainders.
After the Trojan Horses examines queerness and ‘othering’ in
institutionalised spaces. By photographing elaborate sculptural elements in
interchangeable bureaucratic places, Damian Owen-Board eschews the banality of
these locations and creates an uneasy, chaotic wonder. These interventions play
on camp clichés and historical fears of queerness as an invading force
corrupting the ‘normal’ world. They interrogate the institution as a heteronormatively-coded space and present queerness as a disruptive
force which subverts that hegemony, replacing it with something new and
sparkling.
Damian Owen-Board is a London-based artist working in photography, video and installation. Damian’s practice explores ideas of cinematic spectacle and the dichotomy between high and low art and, more recently, the role of queerness, geography and architecture in identity formation. Damian studied at the University of Derby and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he now lectures in photography. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions.
A
collaboration between software algorithms and a human obfuscator, Accrual Media remixes the seminal book
of photographic theory, Camera Lucida
by Roland Barthes, asserting the reordering of the way the photographic image
itself is created and disseminated in the 21st century, over 35 years since the
original’s publication.
Each page of the original
publication has been scanned and subjected to a partially human-guided
application of Adobe’s Space Time Video Completion algorithm, put into
action through Photoshop’s various Content Aware processes. These alterations
prioritise the visual aspect of written language over the coded content and
meaning, leading to repeated passages and words, altered letter forms and
entirely new sentences or visual patterns – generated through invisible and
‘magical’ coding.
Where Barthes, over 119
pages, wrangles with the ‘soul’ of the human-mediated and generated
object/image, Accrual Media
prioritises the objective aspects and
‘mechanics’ of digital imaging, without respect for the stature, heritage and
intended meaning of the source material.
Mike Downing is a UK-based photographic artist and lecturer at the University of Lincoln. His multidisciplinary practice responds directly to emerging themes of online connected societies in visual culture. His work covers diverse themes, such as the animal loving self-identifying supporters of extreme right-wing groups, rural phone networks and reworkings of the classical ‘vanitas’ in plastic.
The Birth of the Image (working title), made in collaboration with Hermione Wiltshire, is a series of six photographs that restage iconic Judeo-Christian scenes from classical paintings showing the Nativity, the Annunciation or apostolic teaching. The images take these well-known tropes as starting points and use the contemporary vernacular of the photographic studio to reimagine them, while placing women characters at their centre. Each central character is modelled by a high-profile contemporary practitioner or academic whose work is linked to the subject of the scene.
SermonStudy
The series seeks to rewrite the narrative conventions which relegate women characters in paintings to subservient roles, repositioning them instead as speaking subjects, professionals and teachers. Instead of serving as adjuncts to the conventional male protagonists, the women become central figures in each scene, with their own legacies to behold. They become responsible, for instance, for the transfer of knowledge (aka the word of God), as seen in the figure of St Anne. In the photograph St Anne is modelled by Dr Hilary Robinson, who is Professor of Feminism, Art and Theory at the University of Loughborough. In The Annunciation, the role of Angel Gabriel is played by Dr Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, who researches reproduction, diagnostics and cinema at the University of Strathclyde.
AnnunciationNativity
Clare Bottomley’s practice
is built upon collaboration and research encompassing photography, video,
animation and participatory workshops. It investigates the individual’s
autonomy in the act of looking, as a challenge to the established authority of
visuality, and is set against the current essentialist forms of representation
that prevail in visual culture, advocating for a more subjective and
anti-essentialist viewpoint. Having completed undergraduate studies in Documentary
Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, Bottomley went on to study an
MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. She is a recipient of the
Deutsche Bank Fine Art Award for her collaborative project, Everybody Says It’s All in Your Head
2016, which went on to be screened in film festivals internationally.
You Could Sunbathe in this Storm (Slight Return) 2018 uses elementary geometric forms and inorganic growth to encapsulate the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Through stop motion animation, three-dimensional plaster objects assemble into toy-like cityscapes before collapsing, while individual cubes, cones and hemispheres interact, taking on a life of their own. Gradually, their smooth surfaces are overtaken by splashes of colour and crystalline formations, resulting in an otherworldly landscape of chroma and texture.
Apart from the
crystals and inks, plaster is the only material used in this piece. In every
frame, the viewed shape changes, but because of the way they move, the eye
accepts them as the same object each time. The continuity of the shape is
believable despite it always being different.
The artist is interested
in the mutability of forms, change as the only constant, the transience of
beauty (and the impossibility of truly capturing it) and, ultimately, the
inevitability of degradation, death and returning to where we came from. The
objects moving on the screen are inconstant but the mind accepts them as one.
Through this work
Dunseath explores the idea that all forms are merely an expression of one whole
and that these forms are interconnected, related and communing with each other
constantly. She hopes for the viewer to experience this oneness, to see their
own part in the universe and feel their own connection to all things and
phenomena.
Times Square Midnight Moment July 2018 captured in 360
You Could Sunbathe in this Storm (Slight Return) played on twenty two screens in Times Square, New York, from
23.57 till midnight every night in July 2018, as part of the Times Square Arts Midnight
Moment.
Alice Dunseath is a filmmaker, animator and Lecturer in
Animation and Image Making at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works
across diverse mediums ranging from video art and moving image to animation,
live action and installations. Her work features video, film and moving images,
sometimes displayed as multi-screen projections.
