Wait Until Dark
curated by Stephen Waddell for the Capture Photography Festival 2020
On view by appointment April 2 – July 2, 2020
Gif Hannah Collins, Money, Death and Industry, 1986
This exhibition attempts to describe some portion of the relationship of figuration, realism and photography. In different moments since modernism representation has been described as conveying an uncontrollable surplus that at times shatters art’s ability to convey the unrepresentable. It was thought at the beginning of the twentieth century that abstraction might reveal an aesthetic mode capable of expressing more about our enhanced presence and diminished existence as humans. It has been imagined that art built on non-resemblance could perhaps exceed thought and call into question the validity of knowledge derived mostly from images. This pursuit sought a sublime path around a “straight forward re-telling” and energized abstract art to be more than a witness. At the same time many artists, and specifically photographers, intensified their approaches, to an art focused on observation, figuration, and resemblance. Artists like Hannah Collins, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), Miroslav Tichy, Rineke Dijkstra and Jacqueline de Jong have all differently employed a kind of objectivity that moves beyond the visible towards a visceral refiguration of the seen and unseen. This exhibition will attempt to show that that resemblance almost certainly carries the promise of the unknowable and/or the unrepresentable in plain sight.









Exhibition installation photography –
RACHEL TOPHAM PHOTOGRAPHY
RACHEL TOPHAM PHOTOGRAPHY