POP (Seeing In) – 2023 @ Bus Projects

‘POP’ forms part of a larger group exhibition under the umbrella title ‘Seeing In’ organised by Rees, which features exhibitions by Elena Misso and Nina Gilbert with accompanying essay by Katie Paine.

For images of Elena and Nina’s works please see the Bus Projects website

Seeing In brings together three photographic artists whose work is centered around and draws from the nuances of darkroom printing processes. Echoed in each of the artist’s works are details associated with the specific architectures of the darkroom and apparatuses of photography, highlighting the corporeal, experimental nature of darkroom printing and bringing images into the world. The works invite contemplation on the seductive nature of the photograph, its reproducibility, and its tangible materiality.

In the twinkling of an eye  the first two paragraphs from the catalogue essay by Katie Paine

A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. 1 These are the words French critic Roland Barthes uses in his mournful observations of the philosophies of photography in his 1980 book Camera Lucida, to describe the complex relationship between the subject of a photograph, the material nature of the image itself, and those that look upon it. I have always been interested in the ways in which we rely on images to act as evidence of events, as a form of mnemonic prosthesis – as if with no image to record it, memory becomes completely fallible. Barthes goes on to discuss photography’s role in 2 verifying moments in time when he articulates “in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there.”

These temporal and phenomenological relationships between image, viewer and subject become explicit within certain images. On my fridge, an image of my sister and I as children smiling giddily at the camera. On my coffee table lies a sleek glossy photograph of a celebrity in a magazine. As I swipe along the glassy surface of my phone, I stumble upon the horror of a body mangled and dusty, beneath the rubble of a building. The chubby folds of my sister’s infant hands clutching mine, the theatrical patina of cosmetics daubed on an actor’s cheek and the obliteration of a city, cloaked in dust, crystalises into immediacy. These are traces of occurrences, the quotidian and domestic, the cataclysmic and the global, all made tangible before my eyes. The photographic image carves a tear in time and space; as I look, I feel I am transported to decades past or cities across vast oceans. 

For catalogue of available works please contact info@aaronchristopherre.es