When I look at the work I was producing 10 years ago I can see a consistent preoccupation with this theme of the frame being reworked in quite a different way in the current series of paintings for 'the fugitive image'.
'Tribe' below was perhaps the one piece I made in the series 'Memory and Metaphor' that engaged the viewer directly in this experience through an interactive installation. By filming and framing the viewer in exactly the same position, looking up and out of the frame in the screen, as the crowd in the post-war British photograph of an mysterious entertainment happening just out of the photo frame to the right, an image of the present moment and the past moment, captured by the media of film, photography and paint are brought into an alignment in 'real' time. Thus the viewer is confronted with, and literally confined within, the limits of the pictorial convention and encouraged to consider the media and the illusion of reality it presents with its strange distortions of scale in time and space.
This week I hope to finish the painting below, started during the February break, before Alex and I leave for Italy, so there will be ten works in this series in the May weekend show. Interestingly the frame itself and the space it circumscribes has become both the subject and context of the work. It is 'filled', as it were, with 'nothing' where there is an expectation of 'something' in the centre of the work, pushing the viewer's attention to the periphery, the edge of pictorial space, the border between real space outside and illusory space within the framed and 'un-framed' frames.
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