"ABOVE"

Marc Provins

26 October 2007 – 30 November 2007

Above is  Marc Provins’ second solo exhibition at The Dagmar De Pooter Gallery, following on from In-Between shown as part of Foto Antwerpen in 2005.  This exhibition comprises of all new work made over the last two years.  In many respects this new work is a direct reaction to the previous, creating a dialogue between the two shows.These are landscape pictures from the edges of towns and cities, from suburban gardens, wastelands, semi-rural parks, coastal scrublands and those bits of the city where the shine has rubbed off.  Borders and thresholds, where one thing transitions into another is a repeated theme in Marc Provins’ work.  There is a constant calming presence in the form of the universal sky. Ever present in the history of art and photography the sky is usually the background but in this work the sky’s role is elevated, as it seems to watch over a disharmonious 21^st century world.

To the casual observer the images in Above may not look like traditional photographs, however this work has photography at its core.  These images are about photography and the process of recording the three-dimensional world around us in two dimensions.  How do we see and perceive the world around us? How do we understand space? Where does the self stop and the world around us start?

Marc Provins is preoccupied by opposites and the distinction between them; Foreground and background; light and shade; focussed and blurred; real and imagined; the self and the universal; colour and monochrome.  There is a constant conversation in these images between these opposing concepts that discuss the still, silent world of the photograph.

There has been a process of stripping back information, reducing a photograph to a more graphic construction - the shapes formed by a brief, fleeting alignment of objects.  Photography can be about how the fall of light stirs us emotionally but what if whole areas of a photograph don’t react in the predicted way?  What if an image contains dead or negative space, no reflected light, no tonal range?  These become like artificial shadows or silhouettes and the background becomes the foreground.