(Un)real
Copy & Paste
(Un)real demonstrates the liminality between the picture and the real, examining the potential for new spaces produced by the photographic print, where the process and subject create something beyond what is expected.
The exhibition features recent work from the four members' practices, including the series Prometheus, Paper Flowers, What Keeps Me on this Earth, and Dwelling. Collectively the works deal with the themes of mythology, the domestic, memory and experience, and the connection between digital and analogue imaging processes.
What Keeps Me on this Earth
Mike Tudor
What Keeps Me on this Earth explores the process of impulsive image making with use of slow shutter and movement to create abstract black and white photographs to investigate a sense of place, the role of memory, and an unsettled relationship with reality.
By shooting on repeated journeys on foot and by train through towns and cities using a simple 35mm camera I am able to shoot freely with instinct. Endlessly fascinated with how light falls on a surface, I explore contrast, textures and tones with oblique and abstract form to give glimpses into an experienced reality to evoke intangible remains of memory.
This project aims to discuss how a photograph's structural elements allow it to be read, concerned with how an experience retained without clarity is held both as memory and in the printed image. A moment experienced, translated to memory and back into an image that can be experienced one again and linked to memories of the viewer.
Website
Dwelling
Paula Tollett
Drawn on personal feelings of the home and memory, ‘Dwelling’ explores the relationship between time and memory, using the illumination of light and shadow as a way to highlight the importance between object, place and memory.
Shot on 5x4 direct positive paper, the work is being shot and processed within the spaces of the house. Each image produced has no negative, producing one original print. There is a sense of importance and sentimentality to each one. They have now become their own unique objects.
There is a feeling of past mixing with present, this feeling of being just close enough to be invited into the space but also separated from it. Images are mixed with hints of memory lingering between each one.
Website
Prometheus
Ryan Smith
Wax, fruit, sea foam, feather, light, fauna, statue, dark, meteorite, cliff, birth, death, projectile, earth, fire, shadow, flight, fall, fixed, unfixed.
Is the image ever truly fixed? While the print is literally fixed to the paper using a chemical compound, the content of that print is constantly in flux. Photographs are dialogical, they communicate, creating various associations and links with the environment they inhabit and other images that might inhibit the same space. Language is what binds the visual to knowledge, and just as words can be crafted into sentences, so can images.
While they can represent something of the world, they can also disrupt it, mould it into something new, creating associations that allude to something other than what exists in reality. Prometheus is based on a visualistion of Greek mythological fictions, but is Greek mythology not itself an analogy of natural phenomenon? Photographs are layered, malleable, and poetic. An attempt to picture is an attempt to represent, liquifying the subject into language. The fragments in this sequence act internally as words, blending into one another. Prometheus is not an attempt to document or record the literature that inspired it, but to subvert it, shape it into something new.
Website
Paper Flowers
Matthew Bruce
Paper Flowers is fundamentally an exploration of 3D scanning/imaging technology and experimentation of its photographic capabilities outside of its intended more industrial use case. By scanning local plant life I am creating a catalogue of 3D subjects that I can view as a point cloud. By then projecting this point cloud onto photographic paper, a direct transfer from screen to paper occurs, no digital file being printed, but a new image entirely - one that shows all the artefacts of both traditional darkroom printing and the digital screen. By highlighting this hybridisation of processes this project aims to discuss the latent image and the physical photographic image in a post-digital context. The individual image titles come from the plants name, and then how many vertices in the polygon mesh that make up the point cloud.
Website
10-14 Waterloo Place
Brighton
BN2 9NB
Map
6–30 October
Wednesday 11:00–17:00
Thursday 11:00–17:00
Friday 11:00–17:00
Saturday 11:00–17:00
Sunday 11:00–17:00
