"Wish You Were Here" is a series of exhibitions organised by OCA tutor and Ffotogallery Exhibitions Officer Helen Warburton (centre) and features Wales-based, early career photographic artists. Occupying Turner House Gallery over three summer months. It' "seasons, foregrounds and nurtures new work that explores photography’s expressive potential; its physicality and limitations alongside concerns that are both intimate and international. WYWH 2014 also provides space for critical dialogues regarding new photographic practice in Wales."
"Wish You Were Here" embraces key solo exhibitions by Janire Najera, (see last feature below), Ryan L. Moule, Gareth Phillips and Eleanor Whiteman, as well as a specially curated group show, At Home He’s A Tourist.
On a warm balmy evening in June 2014 in the upmarket seaside town of Penarth with its famous pier, I went along to the preview evening at Tuner House of At Home He's A Tourist. It features eight photographers. It's a few years since I last visited Turner House - last time was to have some prints assessed when my work was described as 'extremely commercial'. So how would I perceive this display?
"Wish You Were Here" embraces key solo exhibitions by Janire Najera, (see last feature below), Ryan L. Moule, Gareth Phillips and Eleanor Whiteman, as well as a specially curated group show, At Home He’s A Tourist.
On a warm balmy evening in June 2014 in the upmarket seaside town of Penarth with its famous pier, I went along to the preview evening at Tuner House of At Home He's A Tourist. It features eight photographers. It's a few years since I last visited Turner House - last time was to have some prints assessed when my work was described as 'extremely commercial'. So how would I perceive this display?
I stood alone starring at the work of Catarina Fontana whilst a lady visitor took pictures of the prints with an iPhone. I asked her what she knew of the work. She said, "It's my daughter's." "Is she here, can I meet her?" I asked. Hence the evening started with an interaction with the first of three of the artists I was going to speak with and get some useful interpreation of the work as an OCA newbie to photographic art!
Catarina explained the work was from an archive of valuable antique natural history slides capturing the kaleidoscopic intricacies and small confiurations of body, insect bird and mineral. She was one of the few people during the evening who asked ME a question. I said that I had not even tried Macro photography, let alone microscopic - but I had a friend who had! The colours and shapes were beautiful and it made me think more about how I am going to tackle my next Assignment on Colour which my tutor has told me to think more about and take in reading and research - so this was a help for me. Catarina kindly posed for me so that I can remember her and her work as she heads for the University of London to study for her Doctorate.
Catarina explained the work was from an archive of valuable antique natural history slides capturing the kaleidoscopic intricacies and small confiurations of body, insect bird and mineral. She was one of the few people during the evening who asked ME a question. I said that I had not even tried Macro photography, let alone microscopic - but I had a friend who had! The colours and shapes were beautiful and it made me think more about how I am going to tackle my next Assignment on Colour which my tutor has told me to think more about and take in reading and research - so this was a help for me. Catarina kindly posed for me so that I can remember her and her work as she heads for the University of London to study for her Doctorate.
The other piece of work alongside Catarina's was Luke Boland's The Nature of Things. He travels internationally pursuing an on-going project documenting modernisation in landscapes such as powers grids, casinos, oil refineries and leisure resorts. His work reminded me of John Davies whose photo Agecroft Power Station I had recently seen in Graham Clarke's "The Photograph".
I had the good fortune to meet two other photographers exhibiting and be able to asked them about their work.
Bartosz Nowicki is from Poland and left there in 2003 and his work focussed on ideas of home and photos of home when he lived there and new work from his on-going project of taking photographs on his visits home. The all black and white display was accompanied by a narrative of feelings and expressions of home writtne by his sister to accompany the visuals - white handwritten text on black in frames was appealing. The photos and narrative approach reminded my of some of Anna fox's work I had seen recently at the Farnham UCA study day so I had some familiarity and a framework to try and understand this approach more. A picture of a man looking at a grave was explained to me by Bartosz as his uncle visiting the grave of his wife after she died of alzeimers disease. It was good to get the interpretation as liked the rest of his photos, I would have had to draw my own conclusions of what these photographs meant - an perhaps that's how it is supposed to be in the three-way relationship between the photographer, the subject and the viewer.
Bartosz Nowicki is from Poland and left there in 2003 and his work focussed on ideas of home and photos of home when he lived there and new work from his on-going project of taking photographs on his visits home. The all black and white display was accompanied by a narrative of feelings and expressions of home writtne by his sister to accompany the visuals - white handwritten text on black in frames was appealing. The photos and narrative approach reminded my of some of Anna fox's work I had seen recently at the Farnham UCA study day so I had some familiarity and a framework to try and understand this approach more. A picture of a man looking at a grave was explained to me by Bartosz as his uncle visiting the grave of his wife after she died of alzeimers disease. It was good to get the interpretation as liked the rest of his photos, I would have had to draw my own conclusions of what these photographs meant - an perhaps that's how it is supposed to be in the three-way relationship between the photographer, the subject and the viewer.
Bartosz is one of the artists at Third Floor Gallery in Bute Street, Cardiff Bay - once the street of prostitution and crime as Tiger Bay, before redevelopment and re-birth to become the fashionable Cardiff Bay and a centre for art, theatre and culture. His work with narrative appealled to me as someone interested in audio visual production, scripting and narrative. The use of a family member to write the experience side of their relationship with their home country was something I had not come across before.
He posed for a photo so that I can remember him and remind myself to visit Third Floor Gallery again soon.
He posed for a photo so that I can remember him and remind myself to visit Third Floor Gallery again soon.
It's impossible to write in too much depth when there are eight artists Exhibition Officer Helen explained to me so in my own work here I am keeping things brief and concentrating on the three artists I met.
So on to Claire Kern, who like Bartosz is involved with Third Floor Gallery. Her work told a real tragic story. She told me that in 2009, the family home in Jura, France had burnt down. Over thirty years of accumulated history, belongings and experience went to ashes! Claire salvaged whatever family photographs she could and set out on a personal journey to restore and revisit the family life and bonds that they'd had. There were original undamged photos of childhood and family but more surprisingly for me, images that had been damaged but which still represented art. I would have never of thought that damage and corruption of images could make a display but it did - including one large centrepiece photograph of a fire damaged colour transparency - a blue purple oval outline/edge with a red/orange figure in the middle which is reproduced in the Ffotogallery brochure as well. So well positioned as a centrepiece in the display and leading on into her work which at the other extreme included postcard sized prints.
Claire used black and white film to record their experiences as they recovered and went on to build a new home on the site. Her work is described as Chamboulement - an event that changes your life. The work is further described as bringing disparate fragments of these two timelines (tragedy and recovery is how I interpret it), the new photographs and the damaged ones 'are forced to confront each other'. She says it is a pwerful reminded of the fragility of our environment, the vunerability of photography whilsy celebrating the newly evolved photographic project.
Claire shares a very personal side of her life with her exhibition images. It made me think more about how I would feel and react if a major fire tragady were to occur in my life and that if photos, transparencies and digital files were damaged or currupted, how that might transcend the barriers of dispair to new life.
So on to Claire Kern, who like Bartosz is involved with Third Floor Gallery. Her work told a real tragic story. She told me that in 2009, the family home in Jura, France had burnt down. Over thirty years of accumulated history, belongings and experience went to ashes! Claire salvaged whatever family photographs she could and set out on a personal journey to restore and revisit the family life and bonds that they'd had. There were original undamged photos of childhood and family but more surprisingly for me, images that had been damaged but which still represented art. I would have never of thought that damage and corruption of images could make a display but it did - including one large centrepiece photograph of a fire damaged colour transparency - a blue purple oval outline/edge with a red/orange figure in the middle which is reproduced in the Ffotogallery brochure as well. So well positioned as a centrepiece in the display and leading on into her work which at the other extreme included postcard sized prints.
Claire used black and white film to record their experiences as they recovered and went on to build a new home on the site. Her work is described as Chamboulement - an event that changes your life. The work is further described as bringing disparate fragments of these two timelines (tragedy and recovery is how I interpret it), the new photographs and the damaged ones 'are forced to confront each other'. She says it is a pwerful reminded of the fragility of our environment, the vunerability of photography whilsy celebrating the newly evolved photographic project.
Claire shares a very personal side of her life with her exhibition images. It made me think more about how I would feel and react if a major fire tragady were to occur in my life and that if photos, transparencies and digital files were damaged or currupted, how that might transcend the barriers of dispair to new life.
I re-visted Turner House for this next exhibition a month later in July. Najera is a photojournalist based between Wales and Bilbao. She studied Journalism in Madrid and Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport. Her documentary practice is concerned with highlighting communities around the globe, which have been displaced through changing social and economic climates. Through her work her aim is to re-think and develop imagery that questions the histories and environments we belong to. One of her interests is the documentation of human traces in spaces in transition exploring how time can alter our perspective and understanding towards certain issues.
This work documents the last days of The Black Hole, a military surplus store in northern New Mexico. For over 40 years, Ed Grothus salvaged vast amounts of gear from the famous Los Alamos National Laboratory turning a former grocery store into a mecca for technological obsolesence. It was at this Laboratory that the US government developed the atomic bomb and Ed worked there as a machinist from 1949 until he left during the Vietnam war which he opposed as one of the most outspoken anti-nuclear protesters of the 20th century. Ed died in 2009 and during the closure sale, Najera photographed many of the objects there.
As someone born just after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs developed at the Laboratory were dropped on Japan, and living as a young man through the Vietnam war with friends in the US returning to the UK to avoid being drafted, this exhibition was of great interest so me. With photography friends from Vietnam in my current network of contacts, she made me revisit in my mind the terrible days of that war.
Whilst most of the images were simple black and white prints of military artefacts, the way that Najera had captured and titled them was most interesting. Her style and presentation makes the images more appealing than they really are. Some people would call these artefacts junk. Yet she documents materials from a simple ex-grocer's shop in what could be considered a heritage project. She has photographed images of painted bomb cases, a nuclear grade filter, a mechanical calculator that used paper tape. The image of three compact cassettes photographed side by side in one of the images will bring back memories to many of the visitors who will have handled dozens of compact cassette tape developed by Phillips in the 1960's as the new consumer medium for music. But is this art - or pure object photography of artefacts and atomic still life? Perhaps she has made junk into art.
With the current Course challenges of colour and light in my mind, and the future two assignments to be completed, looking at her style, the way she has framed and created the images will be helpful to me. Her timing in creating this project in the closing down period of the shop tells us that timing and opportunity is everything. Not just the Cartier Bresson 'capturing the moment' issue, but maybe finding and maximising the opportunity. The backgrounds she has used are not only black and white but backgrounds with parallel horizontal lines where I though my camera was going to exhibit the moire effect - bit it didn't when I changed the focal length. Give you eyes the horizontal experience below.
Nine items comprising:-
Nuclear Grade HEPA Filter used to capture lab particles during experiments
ABE 700 document perforator
Light reflector found in the Laika section of the store
A DC Amp meter used to measure current in a line form from 0 to 250 AMPS
Ed Grothus' counter nameplate
Part of a medical vaporiser used within anaesthesia machines
Book Diptych - 'The Living World' and 'Nuclear Power Issues & Choices'
Telephone handsets found at the Karma section of the store
American flags found in reception
This work documents the last days of The Black Hole, a military surplus store in northern New Mexico. For over 40 years, Ed Grothus salvaged vast amounts of gear from the famous Los Alamos National Laboratory turning a former grocery store into a mecca for technological obsolesence. It was at this Laboratory that the US government developed the atomic bomb and Ed worked there as a machinist from 1949 until he left during the Vietnam war which he opposed as one of the most outspoken anti-nuclear protesters of the 20th century. Ed died in 2009 and during the closure sale, Najera photographed many of the objects there.
As someone born just after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs developed at the Laboratory were dropped on Japan, and living as a young man through the Vietnam war with friends in the US returning to the UK to avoid being drafted, this exhibition was of great interest so me. With photography friends from Vietnam in my current network of contacts, she made me revisit in my mind the terrible days of that war.
Whilst most of the images were simple black and white prints of military artefacts, the way that Najera had captured and titled them was most interesting. Her style and presentation makes the images more appealing than they really are. Some people would call these artefacts junk. Yet she documents materials from a simple ex-grocer's shop in what could be considered a heritage project. She has photographed images of painted bomb cases, a nuclear grade filter, a mechanical calculator that used paper tape. The image of three compact cassettes photographed side by side in one of the images will bring back memories to many of the visitors who will have handled dozens of compact cassette tape developed by Phillips in the 1960's as the new consumer medium for music. But is this art - or pure object photography of artefacts and atomic still life? Perhaps she has made junk into art.
With the current Course challenges of colour and light in my mind, and the future two assignments to be completed, looking at her style, the way she has framed and created the images will be helpful to me. Her timing in creating this project in the closing down period of the shop tells us that timing and opportunity is everything. Not just the Cartier Bresson 'capturing the moment' issue, but maybe finding and maximising the opportunity. The backgrounds she has used are not only black and white but backgrounds with parallel horizontal lines where I though my camera was going to exhibit the moire effect - bit it didn't when I changed the focal length. Give you eyes the horizontal experience below.
Nine items comprising:-
Nuclear Grade HEPA Filter used to capture lab particles during experiments
ABE 700 document perforator
Light reflector found in the Laika section of the store
A DC Amp meter used to measure current in a line form from 0 to 250 AMPS
Ed Grothus' counter nameplate
Part of a medical vaporiser used within anaesthesia machines
Book Diptych - 'The Living World' and 'Nuclear Power Issues & Choices'
Telephone handsets found at the Karma section of the store
American flags found in reception
Looking at her website and projects on the internet, Najera appears to be a great photographer and not only artistic and investigative but organised - a rare quality for some artists! If only I could have met her, as I did with some of the other photographers above. Looking forward to more exhibitions at Ffotogallery!