A.M.Hanson / UCA Canterbury / Fine Art BA 2010-2013
Artist. Photo-related practitioner. Student.
An Emerge (Office) photo series (2011-12)
As dusk turns to night, in the city, objects emerge and morph in the street level windows of offices and foyers. Behind opaqued, dirt splattered glass frontages, backlit by night / security lights – forms take shape, matter becomes structured vision.
These office objects, unseen to the passer by in daytime and in daylight, now take on a new performative role. Their blurred display hints at the workings of the generic global, corporate office make up. A computer monitor appears as an alien-esque to it’s everyday condition. A stack of propped indexed files evoke the contours of a jagged landscape enveloped in mist.
Office plants appear within a chilled, grey atmosphere as if returned to the forest, surrounded by points of shaped light reflected from the street outside. In another image; a water bottle becomes a diffused whisper of it’s self. The branding in it’s colouration hints at it’s mass produced type, now in diluted tonal gesture.
With these photographs I want to highlight this ordinary experience as heightened visual and performative situation.
I do not want to go inside these offices. In practice and in presentation the window is both illuminating projector and barrier shield. Here the photo making function of registering a thematic witness is combined with responding to the distorted formation and colour field in this multi layered framework.
Looking into these corporate lightboxes, I kind of developed a sort of outsider office fetish. From the street. Through the window. Minus the people. But there again, it is all about the people, the objects they leave behind.
I see these things, in and out of focus, I see them clearly. I see them completely dancing, changing in and out of themselves. And currently I can’t stop making pictures of them.
(project printed matter notes, 2012)
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The prints were displayed in a series of edited test set ups, to prepare dialogues between them and see how daylight and fixed light would affect their appearance. Some were printed on backlit film and hung directly over windows, returning them to a contextual and literal source.
A set shown here in one display view are also duratrans, the reflective nature of the wall (in a daylight infused atrium) acted as a muted lightbox. The smooth print surfaces in counterpoint to the grid brickwork.
One print from the series, Aegis, was shown in a group show, Paper Cuts & Plaster, based on the materiality of objects, in a project space in Dogliani, Italy (Summer 2012), before transferring to Galleria Uno+Uno, Milan (Rock Paper Scissors, October 2012, curated by Alana Lake). The oversized duratran printed image was placed over the inside of the windows. It’s tonality changed with altering daylight and artificial sources. A fixed and evolving photo work.
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In my previous post I talked about how returning to an academic structure has changed my practice processes. There is a brief survey of various works made at UCA, exploring the photo form in relation to a range of themes and concepts.
Here is a sampling from one series that became a defined part of my main research. As the degree show approaches, and in the next few posts, I will show more examples of specific works that gradually formed into constructed series, themselves in a wider, ongoing image making and theoretical inquiry.
The corporate window started to become a fragmented collage of the outside and the inside. A layered looking glass of city life, it’s movement, it’s coloration.
An office (related) fetish, continues..
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more works from An Emerge (Office) photo series can be seen at: http://bit.ly/ZrOUnT
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for archive of UCA works & text see:
www.amhanson-ucalightbox.blogspot.com
