Exhibition: 9th February to 11th April 2012
Photo Opportunity is an exhibition that brings together a collection of artists working in a disparity of mediums- all united by the deployment of photography as the basis of their practice. Beyond this basis, photography can be seen to function in a variety of roles throughout the exhibition most often acting as a means to an end in the pursuit of new configurations. Despite this shared lineage the manifestly heteromorphic results on display are testimony to the versatility of the medium and the ingenuity of artists that it serves.
Raphael Reveron’s artworks are exemplative of this methodology. In his case photographs occupy the core of the work, offering a foundation around which architectural forms implicit in found images can emerge into three-dimensional space. The illusion of space in these photos is given greater credence as the viewer is invited to look through transparent panels to the image’s ulterior side imbuing the works with a sculptural aspect.
In the case of Francisco Nicholas photographs serve as the backdrop upon which layers of superimposed abstraction can accrue and underpinning forms can be surmounted. Juxtapositions of the figurative and the abstract, antique and contemporary are drawn as the intrinsic reality of the photograph is challenged.
Coloured acetate panels, affixed to the surface of the work further convolute our impression of the facade, as fragmentary windows frame aspects of the work in new light. By printing his images directly on to canvas and mixing mediums in seemingly unnatural ways Nicholas realigns the ambition of photography with that of supposedly more malleable mediums.
In Rasha Kahil’s series ‘In Your Home’, photography is used to document the minutiae of daily experience, imbuing seemingly domestic scenes with a poignancy and a profundity that is at once familiar and impersonal. In her work the lens becomes an unfaltering interpreter through which interior worlds can be glimpsed: “The intrusions are an almost animalistic and furtive need to seal an encounter within space and time: the photograph as a stolen imprint.”
Katherine di Turi’s works offer further explorations into the illusionary space promised by photography. By casting the sepia tones of found photographs against jarring slabs of phosphorus colour the reality of apparent space is denigrated and fissures into worlds of abstraction open in the middle of the image.
In the work of Esteban Peña, found newspaper photographs are used as conduits in the realization of his painted impressions. Ecological instability permeates the fabric of his work as apocalyptical themes are framed in a surrealist light. Through his photographic foundation Peña envisions a sunken world where man’s pomposity is laid bare and the guise of security offered in such iconic forms as Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box are submerged rendering emblems of modernity antediluvian.
