Materialising the Abstract
- Kandace Siobhan Walker
To make “real” that which lacks form but is nonetheless felt and experienced, artists must manifest visible worlds from the invisible. The seven photographers presented here centre experiences that we often struggle to name and navigate, from the interior complexities of nostalgia and desire to the legacies of conflicts that continue to shape our present political landscapes to the shifting social categories that produce privileges for some and disenfranchisement for others. These works radically embrace the relationality between the material and the abstract and in this space, manage to collapse the boundary between the two and capture both, or everything, like pinning down water.
Self
In Half Sick of Shadows, a series of landscapes and nude self-portraits that employ the artist-as-subject, Jane Cummins images her way through a study of selfhood and its instability. Cummins uses focus and blur, colour and light, to complicate conceptions of “the subject,” emphasising non-human forms that instead occupy the subject-position in each image. In Self-portrait tape, the impassiveness of her expression contrasts two red rectangles on the wall, where she places the focus, forcing the viewer to attempt to draw from these abstract forms the meaning that her face withholds. In Self-portrait light, the subject turns away from our gaze. Her disengagement refuses the primacy of the human-figure and equalises the elements in the frame; a warm bar of light and its constituent shadows, like the red strips, becomes an indivisible part of the subject.
Cummins’ landscapes, too, function as portraits in their presentation of a self-determination to which the figure in the self-portraits aspires. Her photographs share with Laura Aguilar’s work a willingness to navigate the relationship between the natural environment and the human body. Aguilar, however, collapses this separation into each image, as in Nature Self-Portrait #4 (1996). The conversation created between Cummins’ self-portraits and her landscapes means that even in Sally gap growth—a photograph of an unpopulated forest—the presence of the body, of the self, is felt. These photographs, as images of those spiritual and emotional experiences that refuse form, arrive at acceptance of the body’s communicative failures. And rather than locating an evasively concrete conception of self, Cummins instead succeeds at pulling the ever-present human desire for affirmation and agency into the light.
Position
Chad Alexander’s Entries explores historical-geographical relationships through portraits and urban landscapes. Departing from Cummins’ method of using self-portraiture as an excavation tool, Alexander photographs other people, upon whose faces and bodies the legacies of conflict mirrored in their immediate environments appear. Alexander’s images are frequently dark or taken at night, and his subjects often do not meet the camera’s eye. In Jamie, two images in one spliced horizontally create a doubling effect; its subject, a woman surrounded by greenery, turns away. The lush variety of its environment, grouped with the mystery of the subject—her wristwatch, repeated, as her main identifying feature—and the moodiness of its palette—reminiscent of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro—lends the image a suggestive, baroque atmosphere.
A tension between where we stand and what we can see runs throughout Alexander’s work: the clean lines demarcating the edges of shadows in RIP Decky are disrupted by light flooding the end of an alleyway, a light that also draws attention to the mournful titular graffiti on a distant wall. In another image taken in an alleyway at night, Entry & My Shadow, an interplay of shadows of deepening solidity—the rectangular blocks thrown by houses underneath the light-shuttered shadow of a fence underneath the photographer’s own, partially-visible shadow—further contributes to a sense of revelation and, conversely, secrecy.
Burnt War Mural stands apart from the rest of the series, depicting text and image shrouded by a baleful, crackled burn mark. The heart of the burn, where it is darkest, appears like an entryway, as if a window into somewhere else beyond the mural. This intimation of spaces beyond the spaces we can see recurs throughout the series. As in Faux House, where a real house rises through the frame, its lower windows boarded up and the glass of its upper windows smashed. However, it isn’t the house that the photographer grants his focus, but a cluster of sparse, yet fruitful branches in the foreground. In its presentation of a depersonalised yet intimate human geography, Entries refrains from judging its subjects—instead preferring to critique the act of witness.
Equilibrium
Tricks of the Trade is a sculptural-photographic examination of the process of art-making from Jan McCullough. Her emphatic manifestations of process, alluded to in the installation’s title as well as the companion text written by Wendy Erskine, recalls Richard Serra’s lead and steel sculptures. McCullough’s integration of sculpture, photography and painting, however, bring her closer in spirit to the work of contemporary sculptors like Letha Wilson and Daria Irincheeva. McCullough’s installation works are composed of curved wefts of metal and painted or untreated wood boards, forming structures that call attention to the inherent precariousness of any balancing act. One of the most arresting pieces in the collection: a half-moon of metal sitting atop a small tower of squares of wood, which in turn sits on the raised end of a wide plank supported by a wooden trestle. Like many of McCullough’s sculptures, this piece appears as though it should be in motion. This character of suspended movement produces an air of uncertainty that counterbalances the work’s stillness.
Yet, although the work refuses physical movement, Tricks of the Trade is methodologically whimsical and deceptively direct. Viewing a black-and-white image—part of the Garage Triptych that forms the photographic contingent of the project—down the inner corridor of a wooden scaffold-like structure, one finds that McCullough’s sculptural pieces hold her photographs like frames. This interaction between forms asks for an interactive mode of viewing, a way of seeing that understands the negative space between each piece, between each internal component, as a kind of connective tissue that shapes the relationship between these elements as much as the material properties of the individual parts themselves.
Gaze
Lorraine Tuck’s portrait series Uncle Owen captures the photographer’s uncle, a gender nonconforming person with Down’s syndrome. Dressed as a man, his name is Owen. Dressed as a woman, her name is Pink. Establishing, perhaps, a preconception from which to depart, Tuck presents Owen, in plain clothes, beside a trolley of hay in a farm building. Later, against a garden wall and rusted gate, wearing a dressing gown and trainers, Pink’s expression is confrontational and her body language self-protective. Superficially, Tuck’s photographs may appear to chart a linear and accessible narrative of marginalisation but the work departs from the common missions of visibility and representation. There is an evident care and intimacy between photographer and subject, working against the voyeurism of the cisheteronormative gaze.
What Uncle Owen wants to make real, perhaps, are the assumptions of its audience: how do we decide who other people are, and why do we get to decide? At night, wearing a red trilby and fur coat, Owen casts a casual, robust shadow. His ease and surety summons Peter Hujar’s Richie (1985), a photograph of a man leaning on the roof of a car at night. Where the sky holds Richie’s upward gaze, Owen’s expression is direct. Yet, somehow, the feeling is that Owen, like Richie, is looking past us. Here, the viewer’s gaze is relevant only to the viewer. Tuck returns to her subject an agency that is often denied people who become objects of social scrutiny, as queer people and people with disabilities often are. As in Alexander’s photographs, the driving force of this work is located within a capacity to question, rather than an ability to answer. Rather than leading us to ask who her subject is, and what their identity means, Tuck’s photographs encourage its audience to question who we see, or think we see, and why?
The Past
The past haunts the photographs in Ryan Allen’s FathoM, a series in which the photographer confronts a familial history of grief and care. With a palette that is both clinical and intimate, Allen portrays the domestic disruption caused by his mother’s condition, multiple sclerosis, through images with soft focus, images in motion, images within images. A visceral depiction of pain shows a pale hand blurring until it appears like a second, skeletal hand is erupting out of the original. The image is reminiscent of some of Man Ray’s Anatomies (1929) in its use of an isolated body part to convey emotion. This sense of disturbance is ambiguous, however, as Allen intertwines narratives of love and loss. There is a hushed vulnerability in Allen’s “family photos”: in one image, two men shoulder-to-shoulder, each resting his head against the other.
In his examination of the effect of parental illness and absence on the family structure, and the consequent displacement of gendered roles onto the other parent, Allen captures an experience that is not uncommon but frequently dismissed. A portrait of his father through frosted glass, and another of his back, denote the obscurity into which these experiences fall. In a third paternal portrait, the subject’s expression is direct, a square of white sunlight across his face. With this single exception, the subjects of all of Allen’s portraits in FathoM turn away. The only visible faces appear as photographs within photographs, like two snapshots of Allen’s mother or a wedding photo in his father’s hand. This is the true character of the past: something that, in its entirety, cannot belong to us.
Violence
In Era of the Witch, a series of black-and-white, text-heavy collages, Sara McCarroll juxtaposes pop culture with news media and her own original photographs. Her works are stark and irreverent, foregrounding the violent ideological tensions of our age. McCarroll enters with an examination of the resurgence of neofascist ideologies in the contemporary political landscape: the titular anti-heroine Reynold Brown’s theatrical poster for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), a feminist protest sign replacing the police car in her hand, looms over a river of tiki torch-wielding white supremacists at a rally that resulted in multiple fatalities in Charlottesville, USA in 2017. This collocation emphasises the intersection between ideologies underpinned by racially-motivated and gender-based violence, suggesting how subscribing to one ideology makes room for the other.
In another collage, protestors carry a #MeToo banner underneath a woman with six arms and an animal skull in place of a human head, who resembles a folkloric figure. Appearing behind the protestors and the anonymous survivor-god, is the text of WhatsApp messages exchanged between four men accused of the rape of a nineteen-year-old woman. When deployed as a background for a protest against sexual violence, the casually misogynistic language of these four men (who stood trial in 2018 and were acquitted) calls into question a culture of sexual domination and denigration. Elsewhere, in a collage of four figures, including a witch, sitting on a bench against the repeated phrase, ‘HIS NAME WAS AYLAN SHENU.’ The text refers to the two-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy who drowned during a crossing of the Mediterranean Sea with his family; the publication of a photograph of his body, on the beach where he was washed ashore in Turkey, was widely circulated and widely criticised. The witch on the bench holds a sign that reads, ‘EDUCATION NOT DEPORTATION’.
Where McCarroll focuses her text and her images alternates, at times pitting antagonistic language against sympathetic actors while in other images using language to underscore injustice and honour its victims. The theme of witchcraft seems to suggest that any kind of resolution to the intersecting violences explored within these brash, politically-charged collages will necessarily depend upon something as elusive as magic, and require us to be as subversive as the witch.
Nostalgia
Nostalgia manifests as embroidered lampshades, rotary telephones and strings of pearls in Samantha Johnston’s Strangely Familiar. With a prismatic style and richly symbolic approach, Johnston attempts to reconstruct a feeling instead of an event. Materiality is the photographer’s primary vehicle for this emotion: the weave and sateen shine of fabrics in Reading room and Blue velvet; the low contrast, but colourfully eclectic assemblage of objects in Awkward situation, splayed out like a jumble sale; the artificially-illuminated smoke above vine fruit on a chinoiserie side plate in Trickery of light.
Even when well-lit, the scenes in Johnston’s work appear somehow darkened, like a dream. These photographs veer away from a dutiful recollection of the past towards conspicuous constructions, resulting in images that feel, paradoxically, like faithful acts of remembering precisely because of their figurative disloyalty. Like McCarroll, Johnston plays with cultural memory, using objects wedded to the twentieth-century in our collective imagination to compound a feeling of familiarity. She mines the sentimental power culturally conferred onto photographic ephemera, in Breakfast, presenting colour negatives against yellowed blue-lined notepaper and later, in Bowler hat, a polaroid of an item of headwear whose shape is iconic and so, symbolically discharged. What matters about each artefact is the viewer’s recognition that these objects do not belong to the present; the effect is a character of charming yet disquieting antiquation that pervades Johnston’s work.
Although the objects that populate this work are temporally displaced, each “belonging” to slightly different cultural eras, the pictorial familiarity of these objects builds an understanding of the past as a vague shape, or a beautiful and unrealistic room. However, it is this abandonment of a commitment to realism that allows Johnston to create something truer than recollection. The clear artifice of the sets (and the casually threatening appearance of tentacles in Thirst and Fruit bowl) displaces a sense of personal knowledge and comfort to confront the truth that the past, which can be conjured only through the romantic and unreliable and virulent glass of memory, is just whatever story we want to tell.
The photographic is at times disregarded as a purely figurative and representational medium but, as evidenced here, it is perhaps singularly equipped to reproduce the emotional and intellectual character of those experiences upon which we aren’t able to lay our hands. What we see here is the unseen: these images are exploratory and resonant, calling into the light what is hidden or hiding. Among these photographs, the abstractions of our emotional experiences and social realities—the invisible relational forces between experience and embodiment—take brief and wonderful form.
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Kandace Siobhan Walker, based in London, is a writer and artist of Canadian, Jamaican, Gullah-Geechee and Welsh heritage.
She is a poet and an editor at bath magg. She has won a number of literary awards, including the 2019 Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize.
Kandace has written critical pieces, including writings on Welsh history and an exhibition catalogue for Dundee Contemporary Arts. Her debut poetry pamphlet Kaleido was published last week by Bad Betty Press.
