Simulacrum
Alex Long | Amelia Johannes | James Bacchi-Andreoli | Mido Lee (Lee Chia Jung | Damian Magee | Dimitra Kountiou |Emma Macleod | Jesse Morgan Barnett | Jocelyn Allen | Judith Rowan | Lauren Winsor | Luca Desienna | Mark Adams | Rikard Österlund | Sam Ford | Sian Macfarlane | Valerie Collart | Florence Iff | Mike Callaghan
Private View: Friday 30th September 2011
exhibition continues until Saturday 22nd October 2011
Gallery opening times: Wednesday-Saturday 12-5pm
Elysium Gallery, 31 Cradock Street, Swansea, SA1 3EP
Elysium gallery presents the work of 20 photographers from the U.K., Europe, Australia and U.S.A
'Our era prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being.’ Ludwig Feuerbach
Over the past hundred years our internal memories have been replaced with external aids such as the photograph. These technological crutches are there so we no longer need to store information in our brains.
The implications of replacing our interior memory with an external source means that something will be lost in this process. What is at stake here is every part of our relationship with the world and the people in it. Photography’s sheer ability to be everywhere has affected the collective memory of social and cultural experiences to the extent that photographs can often appear to function as a substitute for the experience themselves.
This exhibition showcases the work of 19 international photographers selected by Turner prize nominated photographer Richard Billingham and Joni Karanka from Third Floor Gallery, Cardiff
Artists Information
Lauren Winsor
A somewhat grubby, monochrome image appears in sight. Caught within the frame is a torso. Slight motion blur breathes life into the image. Kept captive, pinned down to the floor of the studio by both gravity and the unrelenting gaze of the pinhole camera, for an exaggerated time, the figure is literally exposed, naked, in the warmth of the studio lights. The ritualistic gestures with which the photographs are treated can be paralleled to Barthes’ notion of the striptease. Fingers dance over the surface of the print, emulating the same practiced movements of the Parisian burlesque performer. My scratched, tarnished images run in opposition to the modernist conventions of the immaculate photographic print. The marks with which the surfaces are treated are as much an index as the photograph itself, highlighting the untouchable whilst concurrently refusing to allow the viewer to forget the effect of touch. Restricted by gaze, the taboo of the gallery and the smooth quality of the photographic surface, I become an anatomical extension, feeling the textured expanse for the viewer. The photographs appear to function as a substitute for the experience itself.
Winsor was born in London; she is currently head of the 2nd year BA (Hons) Photography (Contemporary Practice) at UCA, Rochester. Her work has recently been shown at The Nunnery – London; Kahmann Gallery - Amsterdam; and The Royal College of Art where she completed her MA in 2010.
www.laurenwinsor.co.uk
Jocelyn Allen
Being Dad from the series One Is Not Like The Other. The project explores the theme of identity by looking at the photographer's closest relatives and herself. The photographs give hints into each person's persona with the differences between the 'copying image' and the 'original' revealing further clues into each person's nature.
Allen graduated from the University of Wales, Newport with a BA in Photographic Art in June 2010. She currently lives and works in London.
www.jocelynallen.co.uk
Mark Adams
Mark Adams is a Manchester based photographer. He studied at the Royal College of Art focusing on narrative based photography and moving image. After a period of living in the United States, the focus of his photography moved towards colour landscapes influenced by the work of the New Topographic photographers. Mark’s conceptually based documentary photographs explore the effects of mans intervention on the landscape through highly colour-saturated images. These images explore a variety of themes such as urban regeneration, surveillance, environmental issues and how landscape and architecture act as an indicator of cultural identity. Mark has exhibited in the United States and England and received the Chris Garnham Award for Photography from the Royal College of Art.
Michael Callaghan
Introducing both a Truth and a Dare. The image is a visual and linguistic tool to clear a zone for thinking. The image appropriates the code of the language of advertising and consumerism and the force of propaganda in the urban landscape – liberating this urban landscape through the artist’s discursive sabotage (signs are subtly altered through the removal of company and product names), turning the messaging on its head and revealing challenging profundity in the advertiser’s own words. The image serves as antiphonal agitprop – challenging the viewer to consider the tyranny of their status quo.
Callaghan works from San Francisco, California. His work has recently been exhibited at Orange County Centre For Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, California; Sylvia White Gallery, Ventura, California; Houston Centre For Photography, Houston, Texas; Pinion Gallery, Brooklyn, New York and Arc Gallery, San Francisco, California.
Rikard Österlund
The Flowers series is a contemporary rephrasing of the vanitas flower piece, inspired by the Dutch flower painters of the late 17th Century. The arrangements are made up entirely of artificial flowers, silk and plastic, alongside toy flies, snakes and other reptiles. The plastic flowers are a symbol of our contemporary excesses, and willingness to replace the real with an easy-to-care-for copy. A reflection of our current 'philosophy of futility'. Every detail of these photographs is intended to mimic that which it is not, not natural, not the original, not a painting, not in a great British art museum.
Rikard Österlund is a Swedish photographer based in Rochester, UK. He is a graduate from Kent Institute of Art & Design. Recent exhibitions include Open Salon 2011, Galerie Huit, Arles, France, Flowers, Gallery 3, Whitstable, Get Real, Rochester Art Gallery, Rochester, Local Artists, Kaleidoscope Gallery, Sevenoaks, That’s You, That Is, Nucleus Gallery, UN-IDENTIFIED, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable.
www.rikardosterlund.com
Florence Iff
The central theme of one of my long-term projects is the domestication of nature, which encompasses both exterior and inner space as concepts on aesthetics.
Landscape is in its origin a concept, which roots in the beginning of industrialization and renaissance painting. Seen as a concept, landscape therefore represents an image of an idea. We declare what an ideal landscape looks like and represent it e.g. in a photographic reproduction. In everyday life simulations of landscape and nature in relation of educative, scientific, recreational-oriented or economical contexts are ubiquitous. They not only influence our notion of nature in its derivation but also enhance implicitness of a designed environment. The differentiation between image, copy, representation, simulation and finally simulacrum is increasingly more difficult.
Florence Iff was born in Switzerland where she is currently living. She spent four years in New York City where she absolved the fulltime program of ICP. She also has been educated as an artist as well as a teacher of fine arts. This year she was awarded the Sony World Photography Award (WPO) Best Photographer of the Year category Landscape as well as second place winner category Fine Art Landscape at IPA (International Photography Awards). Her work has been recently shown in Zurich (Swiss Photo Award), Arles (Galerie Huit), Stuttgart (Fotosommer Stuttgart), Los Angeles (LACDA), New York (Artists Files, Chelsea Art Building), London, Shanghai, Sao Paolo (WPO) and other places.
www.florence-iff.ch
Luca Desienna
My Dearest Javanese Concubine is the story of Tira and Gunawan.
Tira was a 48 years old male to female transgender disfigured by repeated plastic surgery.
Gun is an outcast street boy with no family and no place to stay.
They met four years ago on the streets of Jogiakarta, Central Java, and since then they’ve been sharing everything; their dwelling, their pains and their hopes.
Luca is an award-winning photographer based in London. He received many awards and nominations such as the Px3 ‘People’s Choice Award’, the Photographers' Master Cup and the Travel Photographer of The Year. His work appeared in magazines such as The British Journal of Photography, Intelligence in Lifestyle, VICE, Kult, Vanity Fair and Time Out.
Among his recent job highlights Luca was the Ad campaign photographer for Diesel U Music 2009/2010 and has been the editor of Gomma Magazine from 2004 to 2007.
Dimitra Kountiou
This work is part of photo-trip in Jordan. Exploring the country and getting to know its culture, Dimitra has been observing and interacting with the people in their daily life, at home, in shops, in the streets, at work. Intrigued by the hospitality and friendliness she received, she tried to capture in her photographs what makes Jordanian people so special. The photographs here depict two people in their working environment. Selected from a wider range of work, they are an example of Jordan’s colourful and vibrant culture.
Dimitra Kountiou is from Greece, she moved in Wales in 1998. Her background lies in Graphic Design but photography stole her heart and she is currently a student of Documentary Photography in Newport.
Amelia Johannes
Twinness (Pram 2) is a digitally manipulated photograph, created from a found family photograph capturing twins: my sister and I. The manipulation of the photograph is inspired by a shared twin experience and in particular the viewer’s perception of exact sameness in twinned beings. The photograph plays with the mirroring, doubling and repeating of facial features and gestures through the digital manipulation of reality and blurring of memory, generating an uncertainty and uncanniess in the family photograph.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Australian-based artist Amelia Johannes’ art practice uses video, photography and installation as creative methods to explore the construction of identity: culturally as a Coloured South African migrant and biologically as a twin. Johannes recently completed Master of Fine Art (by Research) at Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne. Her work has been shown recently in solo exhibitions at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts and Propaganda Window (Melbourne) and select group exhibitions at VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery and George Paton Gallery (Melbourne, Australia). Johannes has also exhibited as part of Melbourne’s Human Rights Art & Film Festival (2011) and Australian International Experimental Film Festival (2010).
Chia Jung-Lee
Photography can observe and express the photographers’ perspective, but it can also express the emotions of subjects. Especially the subjects that don’t have human features that express their feelings, like trees.
I grew up in the mountains, and I can always sense feelings from some trees. I see them sitting alone and shouting silently. I want people to understand their anger and sadness when they read my images. So, with photography I can amplify the shouts
Sam Ford
Vestige begins in an abandoned garage filled with waste. This space serves as both a source of materials and studio space. I begin by installing a found photograph on the wall, then using the debris I construct objects I feel place the photograph in some sort of context, physical or historical. It is important that this absurd and ad hoc approach is completely derived from memory, the only referent being the found photograph. My work strives to question the way in which photography is dispersed, mediated and understood within society, in both historic and contemporary settings. The result is a collection of makeshift objects regurgitated from memory, a blurring of fact, fiction and imagination. The objects appear in their simplest form and act as symbols in order to inform the image. My actions are a working
example of the impact photography has on memory and knowledge.
Sam graduated from Camberwell College of Art in 2010. He has been selected for group shows in both London and Paris and was chosen as artist in residence for Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan.
Damian Magee
Memento Mori (Paradise Lost) consists of prints of perished 35mm negatives recovered from family archives that reveal dramatic and violent disturbances inhabiting an otherwise typical holiday scene. As recorded moments in a personal history and its simultaneous negation, via a physical manifestation of transience, ephemerality and loss, this work challenges our dependence on photography to document experience and preserve memories with devices that are as fragile and malleable as our own recollections.
Northern Irish born Magee has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Ireland as well as showing in Britain, US, Poland, Slovenia and China. With a practice that is characterised by his appropriation of the found, Memento Mori is his first immersive foray into the medium of photography.
Alex Long
Typically, photographs fail to communicate the identity of a place, offering a ‘factual’, sterile and often wholly inaccurate representation. ‘Having been there’ is simply combined with ‘there it is’, disregarding any sense of uniqueness, individuality or experience. The Other Side is an attempt to go beyond this, to provide a sense of atmosphere and personality, albeit unavoidably subjective and biased.
Alex graduated from Swansea Metropolitan University in 2008, receiving First Class BA (Hons) Degree. Based in London and the South West, he now maintains his art practice alongside being a freelance assistant.
James Bacchi-Andreoli
’When walking in the city, one may not notice the abundance of failed modernist works unwittingly painted by anonymous individuals and helped along by time. In the Closed Down typology, Bacchi-Andreoli considers the found gestures on windows of shops in-between usage. These instinctive monochromatic ‘works’, developed in the darkroom, ironically reinforce nostalgia for a past ideal combined with a modernist sense of hope. The series also serves to highlight the current uncertainty in the economy through the high turnover of retail space.
James Bacchi-Andreoli was born in 1977 and lives and works in London. Having graduated from the MA Fine Art at Chelsea he has exhibited widely including shows at The Simulator Gallery, Contemporary Arts Society, the Arts Council, mumurART and the Lightbox Gallery, in Woking.
Emma Macleod
That which is sinister, eerie or uncanny plays an important role in the subject matter of my work. Heavily influenced by film, particularly film noir and horror, I explore the universal language and models of these genres. I am interested in the double and notions of representation.
‘Home Series’ is a series of photographic images exploring the prevalent narrative of isolation and the abandoned home in film.
Emma Macleod is a Scottish visual artist born in the Isle of Lewis and now based in Edinburgh. Recent exhibitions include, ‘Type/Script’ Ormskirk Gallery, ‘Artist Showcase’ Timespan Gallery, ‘Space Made Live’ Small Media Large, ‘Police and Thieves’ Occupy my Time.
Judith Rowan
The Dunbar Series evolved while Judith was living in the small fishing town. The Polaroid’s are a painterly response to the place. They celebrate and evoke time and memory, in the connections between the 'extra' and the 'ordinariness' of the town's buildings, and somewhat down-at-heel/neglected atmosphere of the surroundings, on the edge of the North Sea. The Foghorn is one of two on the Isle of May, which were operated by compressed air until 1989. Like the Polaroids, they were withdrawn from active service.
Judith was born in London, and has lived in Scotland since 1975. She is a Professional Member of the Society of Scottish Artists and exhibits regularly.
Valerie Collart
“Falsities”, is a series of photographs, started in 2010, which explores the limits of photography. The images, which are used, are predominantly snap shots of architecture or landscape.
The work is an investigation of the actual material of the photograph as well as what is printed upon it. Further treatment, is applied to the surface of the photograph, such as rubbing a thin layer of ink with sandpaper, directly onto the photo, (The chemical compounds of inks, composing the printed image, are slowly erased from the surface, to reveal colourful nuances).
The interventions on the photos, assimilated to an act of vandalism, but sustaining, at the same time, a photographic reality gives a new impulse to the composition as well as a thought of confusion about the notion of reality.
Jesse Morgan Barnett
This work begins with the realization that photography now refers to and derives from both physical and virtual environments.
Consider deconstructing photography to its essential components, namely
1. The photographable (recordable)
2. The photographer (recorder)
3. The photograph (recorded)
and re-applying them to the Internet “image-world” (as experienced via personal computer + monitor + screen shot). Compressing environment, camera, and image into a singular apparatus and experience is an unconventional alteration to the traditional photographic experience.
The images from FIGURE/DISTANCE use Internet webcams (live streaming + archived) to observe and photograph figures travelling through pre-established image-environments. The Internet allows physical distance to be traded in for virtual accessibility, yet these ambiguous figures exaggerate the detached contemporary virtual experience and suggest that virtual connectivity implicitly binds itself to physical isolation.
Sian Macfarlane
Sian Macfarlane’s work is concerned with the infinite realities that exist within our world, not only those that are immediately visible to the naked eye but also those other planes that can be glimpsed with a sideways glance through the lens of a camera. Her work aims to reveal the land’s mystery, peeling back reality to reveal the magic inherent in woodland sites and the ancient corners of Britain. The abuse of analogue film brings these fictions to life, giving physical form to the hidden colours and spirits of the land.
Sian Macfarlane is a British photographer and filmmaker based in the Midlands, who works predominately with analogue film and old, obsolete equipment.
WEBSITE
http://cargocollective.com/sianmacfarlane
