- Venue
- Rooklane Arts
- Location
- South West England
It is a high profile exhibition for the Somerset town of Frome – of national significance, even venturing abroad in recent years; endorsed by the Queen; sponsored by an international legal practice. It occurs to me that just as this is a big deal for the hosting location, so too is this a big deal for the amateurs who have made it through the selection process and are now displaying their work alongside others of greater experience. This is a collection of work from photographers of all ages and levels of profession, now being received by a demographic of equal diversity as the work begins a year touring the British Isles.
In case we had been left in any confusion by the sunny days, torrent of flooding and single day of snow that November conjured, this exhibition gave a firm prod with it’s assertion of Winter. Snow mist and fog pervaded the old chapel through several photographs, and none more dramatically than in ‘Squealing Colt’ by Honglin Zhang. A strange sense of distorted perspective finds horses in bird-like V formation disappear into a misted white between land and sky, wild yet orderly, galloping yet inert. With a rearing horse and it’s weathered passenger grappling in a cart in the foreground, the title presents an uncertain situation, one of fear, of delight, of animal adrenaline.
From photographer Daniel Liley, an arrestingly ordinary image became increasingly disconcerting. Every town has a street that looks like the one that sighs in the background of this photo. So commonplace that the adolescent boy in a black suit posing defiantly seems out of place, almost laughable. Is this a marking of territory, or a stand against the situation that has lead him to be in this get up – be it celebration or a darker ceremony? The perspective angles him almost as tall as the buildings, marking him out momentarily as another monument in the suburban landscape.
There was soft humour in some of the works in the exhibition, often juxtaposed with a surreality brought about by ambiguity. Jan Lesniak capitalised on stark contrasts in her monochromatic exhibit, ‘Mysterious Thoughts’. A wide-eyed toddler, gazing at the camera in blank wonderment, and behind her a dark shadow of a simple plastic chair, somehow floating half way up the sun-bleached fence. The placement of the shadow tricks us into seeing the dreamlike positioning of the suspended inanimate as a shadow from her imagination, posing as a thought aptly lingering above the child’s head.
Tucked away in a corner of the exhibition, what could be described as navel gazing was occurring. However, not in the egocentric sense of the phrase, but rather actual observation of a tummy button. With its grainy quality ‘Pin’ by Arigo Mamone appeared two dimensional, a surface as opposed to a whole. With one viewer pointing out the odd similarity between this familiar bodily oddity and a desert plain with a single Savannah-like tree in the middle, the small mole on their skin easily took on the role of the sun. What was so inviting about it was it’s casting of the body as landscape and as texture. It is an objective perspective, and without context becomes something laughably meaningless.
