It is, Still

Opening Reception (with artist’s talk) Thursday, 10th March 7pm – 9pm

The photographic series It is, Still (2009) explores how much portraiture can communicate with the viewer about the interior emotional state of the subject. The images’ silent choreography of subtle gestures and poses could be an attempt at interaction with the spectator, or instead part of an interior dialogue with the self. The expressions of the young people photographed are similarly ambiguous and unsettling; they can read as anguish or despair, but are also evocative of 18th century paintings of saints depicted in a state of grace, communicating with the divine.

Included in the exhibition at Context Gallery is a new video work, Imagining Disappearing (2011). Again portraiture is engaged with, and here literally deconstructed, in terms of its ability or inability to connect us to a depicted Other. Here we witness the slow disintegration of an image of a man’s face, the eyes are closed suggesting a passive and willing surrender. The piece was made by submerging a colour photograph in chemicals that release the layers of red, blue and yellow dyes that make up an analogue print. Ideas about death (long associated with photography and its stillness, its portrayal of what has passed) are evoked. Here this is a gradual transition into non-being, a tension with, bleeding into, and eventually becoming part of the exterior environment.

*All exhibitions and events prior to 2012 are credited to The Context Gallery, our former name.