PRESS RELEASE

Cian Quayle

"This Will Kill That"

08 may 2009  - 13 june 2009

This exhibition features a selection of recent photographic artworks which includes four large photographic transparencies displayed in lightboxes. Each of these shows four locations which are at once familiar but could be found anywhere, a deserted gymnasium, red-roofed suburban houses, the deck of a sea-swept ferry journey and an empty plot of land amidst an industrial cityscape.

An embryonic photographic work for two slide projectors utilises found 35 mm photographic transparencies which forms part of ongoing practice which embraces all aspects of the medium of photography. In this work slide images sequenced as part of a double projection utilises analogue slide technology where the images are seen via a succession of fades and dissolves. This works explores the contingencies of a selection of randomly appropriated images where time, place and memory are expanded and condensed in an anti-narrative which dislocates the viewer’s experience of a world of images.

Slide-tape technology was developed for corporate presentation, commercial and advertising usage. As a precursor of what is now ubiquitous as PowerPoint type presentation techniques the digitisation of sound and image erases the materiality of their formation. The lightbox might be considered in a similar way to slide-tape technology in its commercial usage in advertising and signage. In these examples obsolete forms of technological and photographic reproduction have been recovered by artists who have transformed the usage of these technologies where the structural formation of the artwork, materiality of the image and its reception by and implication of the viewer is clearly manifest. In these works the experience of the technology of production, reproduction and projection is integral to the experience of work where the meaning of the work previously thought to reside solely in representational strategies, original image or authentic artwork are displaced in photographic work that hovers at the cusp of stillness and movement, narrative and not narrative. The title of this exhibition makes reference to Denis Hollier’s essay Surrealist Precipitates and Victor Hugo’s pronouncement via Zola deflected and adapted in relation to obsolescence and return

Cian Quayle is a lecturer in Fine Art Photography at the University of Chester. In September he will also exhibit in Under the Volcano at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool in an exhibition, which celebrates the birth of the author Malcolm Lowry. He is also organising a conference, which addresses the legacy of Kurt Schwitters in England in relation to notions of appropriation in relation to the found object and photography.