- Venue
- Purdy Hicks
- Location
- London
Purdy Hicks specialises in exhibiting fine art works that do not banally tick the boxes of contemporary post-modernism, but are considered, engaging works which not only are aesthetically beautiful but speak of significant concepts and philosophies.
Visiting Purdy Hicks Gallery is akin to entering a church, the clean, crisp, calm white space affords a perfect place for contemplation in sharp contrast from the hustle and bustle of the streets around the Tate Modern. Stepping up into the gallery from the outside gives an impression of ascending into the work, this physical act of climbing to enter lends itself to a cinematic suspension of the present – To engage with the fantasies and philosophies presented before you means sustaining belief in the here and now; removing yourself from the everyday.
Tessa Traeger’s work has previously been exhibited at Purdy Hicks, her recent show entitled The Chemistry of Light spoke to me of many things. Her found glass plate images of ancestral family photographs portray an interesting reminder of the philosophical concepts between life and death. Many of the images in the show were of relatives that had long departed this mortal earth, their images once fixed onto glass plates were also disappearing with the march of time. Many of them attacked by the very silver salts and chemicals that had made them visible which in turn resulted in adding another layer to the provenance of the objects displayed and creating remarkably brightly coloured abstract patterns. These images seemed to me to contain that uniqueness and aura that Walter Benjamin discussed in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Here he describes art work that is not reproducible as holding within it an ‘Aura’. This is, as I understand it, is where the authority and uniqueness, the originality of a thing that cannot be re-produced, holds within it an intrinsic sense – its ‘Aura’. Much Photography today does not appear to possess this aura. I would suggest that Tessa Traeger’s work, (although the large images on display at Purdy Hicks are digital copies of the original plates), still retain this aura by their signification of an allegory with time and the history of the images from her family album; the work had become objects that had been built up in layers over many years.
Tessa states this decay illustrates a metaphor for the disappearance and ultimately the loss of traditional photographic techniques now replaced with faster more immediate forms of digital image making. Where a craft involving the skills of an artist is considered by some to have been superseded and replaced with a technology that allows everyone to produce such images for the family album, with the immediacy we have come to expect in a computerised postmodernist digital age. This connection is interesting and is overtly rendered by her in the concept of a limited edition book of her works for sale at Purdy Hicks. A beautiful hardback containing the images from the show is held within a crisp white sleeve with an Apple Mac symbol, recognised worldwide, placed in the centre. Made to imitate a laptop, a symbol of digital image making, it holds these precious memories of time within its cover. I found this rather strange or perplexing; it somehow seemed to persuade me the work was less precious than I perceived it to be. However it did illustrate the connection Tessa had made with the loss of a photographic craft that existed a century ago and todays abundance of digital photographic images.
To me her work here is not concerned with simply illustrating the capture of a moment in time, a time gone by and long forgotten by many, or simply a relation between a craft disappearing as we have entered a technological, fast paced, digital age, but it is concerned with the process of time as a whole. The work reveals the historical layering that has been placed onto and within the glass plates by the very nature of the process that initially made the portraits visible.
Much of the work that held my attention illustrated the way the salts on the glass plates had seemed to grow and spread like a disease eating away at the original image. I viewed them not so much as images of decay but of a manifestation of the power of nature over which we as humans have no control, ironically it is images of human likenesses that have succumbed to this power. They read as a metaphor of our inevitable surrender to the decay and death of our bodies.
One of the images of a man splendidly done out in his best bib and tucker, eyes staring out at us as he waits for his image to be captured has been fractured by the aging chemistry resulting in the lifting of an emulsion as fragile as life itself, once holding his image as one entity. This presents a strong powerful metaphor signifying the fracturing of our inner selves as we face the trials and tribulations of life to the ultimate physical fracturing of our bodies as our life ebbs away and the chemistry and physical substance of our mortal remains dissolves. Yes, I have a fascination with works that create a link to the Memento Mori and I do believe this work gives the viewer a deeper philosophical message than merely one of found images demonstrating a dying craft.
This show has now ended its run at Purdy Hicks but I’m sure if you visited the gallery the very friendly staff would be able to tell you more about her work and possibly have images of Tessa’s for sale.
This is work that I’m sure will be on show again very soon; do keep a look out as it’s something not to miss.
