meatyard arts goes urbis…
This is an exhibition of work by seven contemporary photo artists and is prompted by the enquiry that is at the core of the ‘Photography as Contemporary Art’ course at Urbis.
This programme of seminars and workshops is a collaboration between Urbis and Meatyard Arts that explores photo practices and examines the processes through which, the singular and often obscure interrogations of the photographer are transformed into ‘art’.
The very notion of ‘art’, in the popular consciousness, is a fiercely contested one. In the corner on the right the ‘ancien regime’ parades its canon of master works, as does the corner on the left with its faded reductionist flags of deconstruction. Each side has its advocates, speaking in tongues to their own constituency and energised by mutual enmity – a pantomime media pastime that has, of course, critical ramifications for artists as funding ebbs and flows to the loudest populist shriek.
What can be agreed, after Szarkowski, is that the mark of intelligence, of selection and organisation is the continuum of creative practice… the stuff that transforms mere description into that which raises us out of the humdrum and the routine.
Our seemingly inexhaustible fascination with looking at ourselves is here in the works of Al–Irimi, Hall and Gosling. But whilst they ostensibly occupy the same photo category of portraiture, the similarities end there as each artist arrives at markedly different outcomes. In one we can see the transgressive
tattooed body aestheticized as theatrical still life, another presents New York street vignettes and another, different again, uses the portrait as unsettling, uncanny cipher of memory.
Now, the trace, or filigree of ‘art’ can be just so, the deliberation and selection visible only across a body of work, or in the obtuse approach to what would at first appear to be banal subject matter.
This distilled, austere examination of place is represented here in the work of Woods and Lowenstein and Page, the first a study exposing the material consequences of a socially devoid political culture, another a deeply personal exhumation of place, history and memory and, finally, Page’s repetitions on the ‘uber English- ness’ of the semi detached.
Although altogether different in scale and approach, Pinkcombe’s epic large format pictures operate in similar ‘socially concerned’ territory, photo studies that stretch the credibility of the medium itself as they question the very ‘truth’ of that which is represented.
The work on show here demonstrates both the range of themes out of which practice emerges, but also the variation in how those investigations are visually expressed.
John Donaldson, Meatyard Arts, November 2009. www.urbis.org.uk/learning