A.M.Hanson / UCA Canterbury / Fine Art BA 2010-2013.
Artist. Photo-related practitioner. Student.
The Globes photo and installation works, (2012, ongoing), part of An Emerge (Office) project.
Lights. Physical objects. Spherical, suspended, illuminated globes.
In the previous post, I described the photo series based around the office objects that emerged backlit through opaqued glass, street level windows and frontages of office and corporate spaces at night. This distilled, artificial light, was observed in relation to the objects appearance, the picture making process and how the prints were to be displayed. As more images were gathered and edited as part of the series adaptation, a more defined understanding of this particular light source’s concept and essence came into register. It is the crucial, fundamental element surrounding how the objects are perceived and communicated as entities in a body of images.
As the project developed and the more I literally looked into, and thought about, these corporate settings and set ups – the more I began to see and respond to other connected situations in these domains.
Looking for one thing provoked seeing the same, or the similar and it’s relatedness in form, character or circumstance. Was this enough?.
Photographic series, by historical and accepted pattern, are usually about same-ness. Whether in art or documentary genres, the point of perceived contact, is the visualization of the narrative. In example; here we see a flower, now a set of flowers, different flowers photographed in a similar way. Why is it that if those same flowers being similar and are then photographed in radically different ways, are somehow not of the same perceived series?. It is as if we only accept the series for it’s aesthetical sameness. The work is accepted because it ticks the box of sameness, it’s serial nature. We see that an artist has repeated the conditions, applied them, so we think, yes, this is stylistically and thematic good, or not, but – it is a photo series.
My research and interests, not least also being in studios of interdisciplinary work making, have helped form a new self structured attitude towards photo making and the photo form. Seeing paintings progress, ideas and forms take shape, being wiped away, layered, re worked. Visiting shows and sites, where forms and thoughts materialize through installed, architectural frameworks – continues to help inform and instill a wider consciousness.
Projecting my photo based projects into formations that purposefully push their own photo based potentials.
How to do this?. With a developing certainty in concepts and subject matter and an evolved aesthetic through practice, it was time to take a leap of considered faith in editing procedures and displaying formats.
For the photo form and this expanding project, I was keen to apply aspects of these experiences, and of being outside of my own photo making bubble. Seeing more, in and out of the white cube or site specific scenerio, in it’s archival documentation, and aside of all this, in being alive and open eyed in occurrence, in life.
Returning to the light. The source, and theme, that had been the initiating factor of the opaqued office objects – I kept seeing the actuality of globe lights again and again, repeatedly. I didn’t want to record them literally, I wanted to explore them as new rising and setting suns and eclipse moons. In the city, in London (and generically, globally), they are often eternally lit.
They also provide a fabricated luminescence to what was, and is, becoming another facet in this area of research and work – the return gaze, the shadow of – the office plant.
More about these palms and their reflections in the next post.
The Globes is not a series, they are prints of lighting features, seen in these corporate spaces, fragments of a project, components of past and prospective installation.
In the public spaces at UCA, I found new positioning for them, as objects in photos and as photo objects, held in new space and time.
The repros here, show the first image, still part of An Emerge (Office), photographed through the mists of opaqued glass. Others followed, made out of focus through clear glass, or un-lit, eclipsed from another point. The serial motif was the same, but the thematic hue had changed.
The image choice and installation provided the next point of transformation and interaction with the works.
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UCA projects:
www.amhanson-ucalightbox.blogspot.com
info, shows & published work:
www.alexcalledsimonprojects.com
