Echoes, Lights Unfixed



Performance at Basement 6, Shanghai
Live synchronised sound by Swimful
26 Silver Gelatin B&W Prints

2013

Collaboration with Edward Dowsett


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Light flashes through a dark chamber, tracing out a spectral scene, a ghost image, that fixes into your field of vision, which eventually fades and distorts like a remembered dream. After it a bruise, purple and blue, lingers and gradually
diffuses into memory.

These prints are the results of a series of earlier performances in which eight participants at a time were guided by the artists through a number of choreographed positions. The performances took place in a completely darkened chamber with live synchronised sound installation, through which would periodically flash a bolt of light, burning onto the retina of the participants a temporary ghost image of the scene confronting them, which would then fade and gradually return in shades of blue and purple. Each participant was accompanied by a handmade camera, operated by the artists, which mirrored their eyes journey through the chamber. The same burst of light is etched into 8 different camera, in different positions and angles.

To become the subject of a photograph is to give oneself up to the photographer. In these prints we see this implicit relationship taken to an extreme; not only was complete bodily submission to the artists required to navigate the space but disorientation, and uncertainty about when the photographic moment would take place, occasioned a particular unveiling of self and vulnerability to the image. The print’s scars record the process of creation, becoming unsettled and as precarious as the scenes they recorded.



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