Friday, May 16, 2008

Unearthed....Photographys Hubris....









Some examples of the final submission I hope to end with. The idea of burying the negative and then reclaiming it, is meant to work in different ways. Firstly as a means to interrupt the image so as to create an object that is changed and in a process of continual changing, Secondly to disrupt the photographs indexicality, to render it as a non photograph. To destroy in a way the photograph but rather than destroying it, transform it into a new object that mediates the fallibility and inadequacy of the pursuit I have involved myself in. To destroy the negative in this way is a means at which i can underplay the photographers desire to hold fast the real and fluctuating processes of both the landscape and the memories held there within.



"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley.




Thursday, May 15, 2008

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Mark Durden: Bouncers



"For this performance, 15 bouncers were hired to adopt and maintain a confrontational geometric configuration in the gallery for the duration of the opening night of the exhibition। Drawing upon the rhetoric of Minimalism, the piece is meant as an aggressive work, impolite in relation to the viewing public।"

www.newport.ac.uk

Unearth...Final images






Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Unearth









These images are the beginning of the possible edit of the upcoming book for the exhibition in June. These images of the backs of the family photos, along with the text describing the image, represent both a refusal to add to a collective memory (as constructed by photographic imagery) and a meditation on the distance between lived experience and the representations we make. in trying to unearth the memory of my father, the photographs i constructed revealed the inability of photography to reveal the individual.

The importance of these images is in their refusal to show, the refusal to add to collective memory. The importance of the realisation that his memories exist not are mere representational forms but as part my own experience and thus part of myself.

'A photograph passes for incontroveritible proof that agiven thing happened. The picture may distort: but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist,'

Susan Sontag, On Photography



The possibility of truth?