Reflectance
The ratio of the total amount of radiation, as of light, reflected by a surface to the total amount of radiation incident on the surface.
My work is primarily concerned with dialogue or dualism. Interactions between form and content, text and image, viewer and object. Other key concerns are the visibility or sculptural possibilities for the projection apparatus, celluloid materiality, truth to materials and display systems regarding the projected image.
These concerns often manifest themselves as 35mm slide projections, sequenced circular stories containing found imagery or text, hand-made text slides or iterations of my conceptually-driven photographic practice. There is a constant trail of the personification of the projector running through many of my recent works. They often reference their own form, acknowledging their positions as projected image artworks and as a medium edging towards obsolescence, questioning our relationship to technology and how we attribute trust, meaning or value onto an object, image or text.
This projected image installation consists of 5 slide projectors containing 360 slides.
Within this there are three works:
Alternate ways of experiencing images
The text of this work (dual corner projection) is based off two texts by Tom Gunning, one on the Lumière brother’s film of workers exiting the Lumière factory from 1895.(There are references to this film - construction workers outside Google headquarters) It is sometimes thought to be the first film, yet the roundhay garden scene from 1888 pre-dates it by 7 years. This lead me to thinking about truth, history and photography, which brought me to Bayard. HippolyteBayard invented his own process that produced direct positive paper prints in the camera and presented the world's first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839. Bayard was persuaded to postpone announcing his process to the French Academy of Sciences by François Arago, a friend of Louis Daguerre. Arago's conflict of interest cost Bayard the recognition as one of the principal inventors of photography.
As a reaction to the injustice he felt he had been subjected to, Bayard created the first staged/conceptual photograph entitled, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man.
This portrait has become a sort of motif within this work to signify the importance of those left out of the traditional canon of history, women in particular, while also questioning where truth is to be found in image-making. Bayard has almost become the protagonist for these two works.
Gunning’s second text that the text slides are based off is The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. To quote Gunning,The Cinema of Attractions is "a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator." Essentially instead of the viewer focusing on the narrative, the films from cinema of attractions encourage the audiences to remain aware of the act of looking, the impulse and excitement from the image.
Gunning mentioned Hale’s Tours in this text, Hale's Tours of the World were an attraction at amusement parks and similar venues in the early 20th Century. They were specially constructed spaces designed to simulate a railway journey. I referenced this in many of the accompanying images, taken out of moving vehicles.
Reportage
This smaller scale work simply consists of diagram slide followed by colour slide. The diagrams reference their form, showing diagrams of the internal structure of cameras, projectors and the chemical structure of black and white negatives and colour transparency film.
The colours used reference the various colours used throughout the history of the development of the colour print. These colour slides also act as punctuation.
All the works and the structures that the projectors sit on all work to expose artifice, recognizing their own form and content, whereas this screen in being an illusionary device, counteracts this while also emphasizing it. The positioning of the screen also acts as a way to draw the viewer into the centre of the room.
This work also plays with the slide projectors use as an educational medium, re-performing a previous function.
Narrative work
This work critiques or more so explains what a narrative is/ what it does, while also at some points performing as a narrative. Parts of this text derive from texts on narratology, namely Gerald Price and Mieke Bal. Street photography as a medium of the 20th century counterbalances the medium of slide projection in the work’s dialogue with obsolescence.
It also exists in as a text/image sequence that overlaps and interelates, something that we automatically do as viewers- correlate text and image, read them together. At times the sequencing plays with that, the relationship between the text and image is non decipherable while in others it is explicit.
These are three separate works - yet they also interrelate spatially and conceptually.