Cooper Gallery, Dundee.

Preview : Friday 5 February 2010, 6-8pm

6 February – 6 March

Philip Braham (UK), Eric Baudelaire (FR), Patricia Esquivias (Venezuela), John Isaacs (UK/DE), Wes Lang (USA), Richard T Walker (USA), Liu Wei (China), Matthew Wilkins (UK)

An international group exhibition of works which explore our relationship with images, what they mean to us personally and within society, how they reflect the past, present and future to us and their ability to comfort, inform and disturb us.

This exhibition bring together a selection of meaningful and works which expose and draw attention to our relationships with images. The photographic image appears in several of the works taking slightly different forms; in Liu Wei and Matthew Wilkins’ video works the photograph features in singular or collective form as a representation of a personal or national archive. Where Wei uses a familiar and shocking image from the Tiananmen Square uprising, Wilkins draws on a sweep of family photographs and the lifeline embodied in them for ‘A series of Disappearances’.

Wilkins’ film questions the life of someone known only through photographs and considers what coded message was intended to be passed through to the viewer. It lets us follow the life of a female family member from a bygone age and questions the assumptions and fantasies involved in our reading of photographs from different time periods. Wilkins considers the following questions within his practice ‘photography and film brings us closer to the world and yet the medium itself is a barrier between the viewer and what is being represented. How has the photographic medium changed the way we see our selves and the way we perceive such elemental things as time? How does the history of images inform our imagination and so influence the way we see things?’

Wei’s work ties more closely to a specific historic and current social approach to images. He is based in China and much of his work deals with the denial and ignorance enabled by censorship of images. In ‘Unforgettable Memory’ the artist takes a well known image of the resistance to the Chinese army in 1989 to the Univeristy campus of Beijing. The people he asks to comment on it either do not seem to recognise the image or they do not want to speak about it.

Eric Baudelaire’s work also centres on representation through photography and the censorship of images. Three connected works are presented, two framed gravures and a quiet observational video. The video ‘[sic]’ shows a smart book shop assistant gently scraping the ink from the pages of imported publications to erase any sign of the pubic area in nude photographs. The assistant gradually deviates from this action by obscuring and then adapting other visual elements to the photographs, extending the project to street scenes and abstract images. Baudelaire cites a source chronology for his gravures ‘Of Signs & Senses’ starting with:

1907 Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code outlaws the sale and public display of “an obscene document, drawing or other object.”

And recounts several key abandoned legal cases that have left a grey area described here:

1982 The Japanese Supreme Court declines to clarify the concept of obscenity any further, but nonetheless acquits Oshima. In a legal and semantic grey area that remains to this day, graphic materials imported into Japan are subject to subjective self-censorship: explicit anatomical representation is replaced with ‘bokashi,’ a fogging, blurring or scratching of male and female genitalia in films and publications.

The gravures exhibited alongside are close ups of the censored pages and take an alluringly and ambiguous abstract form because of the loss of scale and texture of the print.

Richard T. Walker and Philip Braham’s work both consider nature, landscape and our relationship with it. In the Walker work ‘everything goes as if it is always away.’ a landscape photograph, which looks like a United States Illustrated Encyclopedia page, is pierced through to hear a soundtrack of winsome mountain song strumming. The letters strewn below also allude to a distance and isolation where connections and correspondence take on special significance.

Braham’s photographs are part of a series ‘Suicide Notes’ in which he has noted the Scottish newspaper coverage of suicides within the landscape and visited the sites to record a photograph of that place. The resulting scenes show a quietly energetic nature which is at once calming and foreboding.

In Wes Lang’s work the image ties both to history and to fanatical pop culture. Famous for his body of work around Willie Nelson, Lang works with collage and drawing to produce works which are precious in relationships and humble in materials. He brings images together with text and song lyrics to make totemic works that seem to be born from popular culture and would not look out of place pinned to a door in a workshop, or behind a bar. They seem motivated by desire and sometimes jealousy, and there is an implied vulnerability to mass media persuasion through marketing slogans. In an interview with David Coggins for Interview Magazine Lang says: ‘I like to take American history and then completely ignore it. I come at it visually, taking images and telling my own story. It comes out of criticism and great love.’

Patricia Esquivias’ practice shows a dedication to and perhaps an obsession with the image. The video ‘Folklore II’ is an illustrated lecture to camera where digital print outs reinforce the story which she delivers. The story is one of coincidences and connections binding two prominent figures in Spanish history together. Images of Julio Iglesias and King Phillip II of Spain (1527-1598) are linked through a series of other images, which often are picked to make more of a visual plot point than their provenance. For example when Esquivias is describing what a turning point the World Fair of 1964 was for Spain she says of the interior of the pavilion, while propping a picture of a traditional Spanish courtyward covered in floral hanging baskets on her laptop screen: ‘and the inside, this is not the picture, but they said that it was full of flowers…and very, very nice’.

Esquivias’ gallery Murray Guy describes the artists technique as follows, ‘mixing historical facts about Phillip II’s reign and tabloid gossip about Iglesias and his private life, Esquivias takes us on an educational journey from the dark isolated Spain of Franco’s reign to the sun-drenched Spain of present day mass tourism.’ (www.murrayguy.com)

Another work by Esquivias in the show is ‘Reads Like the Paper, group II’ a collection of shorter pieces which use photos, found footage and computer screens to explore the artist’s relationship with the images and the scenes within them. The narrative voiceover which the artist provides explores the physical attributes of the images and the experiences behind them. In one short piece images of buildings flash on the screen and the artist describes simply how long she stayed in each building.

John Isaacs ‘let the golden age begin’ is a work where the nostalgic imagery and materiality belie a dark history and draw attention to the danger of idealism. The artist found the saccharin page within an old nazi propaganda magazine and sweetened it further with glitter embellishment. Isaacs cited this quote from Hitler which articulates the power of the image to the propagandist ‘The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings.‘ (Mein Kampf citations are from the Project Gutenberg-hosted 1939 English translation by James Murphy).

Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, 13 Perth Road, Dundee, DD1 4HT

T: 0044 (0)1382 385330 E: exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk W: www.exhibitions.dundee.ac.uk