Selecting Self

The five artists exhibiting together at the QCP this month present photographic series that each references their own artistic self-exploration and/or self-presentation. With the exception of Tanya Baker all of the work exhibited was produced at an undergraduate level. These are artists at a very early stage of establishing both ideas and process.

Baker has produced triptychs in the series ‘I Am A Rock, I Am An Island’. Each work pieces together photographs of autistic children, landscapes and deceased dogs. These purposely-disparate images engage in a broad questioning of isolation, existence and mortality. Baker says, “the series illustrates the connection between exterior and the interiority of the individual”. That is, the series aims to project Baker’s own concept of ontology through emptiness and the unknown – with the aim of creating a personal connection between our own senses of being.

Katie Mitchell is interested in the idea of spirit and self, making images using a flatbed scanner. The scanner has become an important tool in exploring her body/self – and medium. She describes the physicality of this process as an unseen performance. Each image acts as a document of the awkward marriage of the two unfamiliar surfaces. This alienation between surfaces is emphasised by Mitchell’s use of stockings with her body, covering and uncovering and finally expelling. Reminiscent of ectoplasm, ousting the female covering from her body incites further discovery of spiritual identity.

In her most recent work Midori Kawai photographs herself situated above simply constructed miniature stages, interacting with the figures within each set. They are bathed in bright solid colours, with planets floating in the darkness behind her head and shoulders. She represents a different theatrical character in each photograph, which signifies her Japanese culture, and their belief in numerous gods. She describes her work as “a portrait of the female (me) as a creator and god figure”.

Kawai presented an installation last year, which invited the viewer to lie underneath mosquito coils hanging from the ceiling. The audience submitted both physically and metaphysically to Kawai’s memory of Japan through light, shadow, object and sound. The photographs in this series present a pictorial representation of this notion, and her continued questioning of self in western culture.

Chani Ridley also positions herself in her work - personal dreams becoming the subject matter for her staged photographs. She sets up and photographs situations rendered in her sleep. Several scenarios are dreamscapes we can all identify with, allowing us to align our own subconscious to Ridley’s. Indicative in both psychology and aesthetic to contemporary Gregory Crewdson (albeit without the lavish production), Ridley de-constructs the subliminal through the re-presentation of her physical environment.

Heavily composed portraits of nature have become Paul Smith’s focus in his series ‘Fragility’. There is a sense of discovery in the work, and in the time the artist spends finding shape and form in his natural surroundings. Smith has an uncanny knack for noticing and engaging the elements within his environment. Here he sees nature’s adaptation of man-made objects and industry as a fragile existence, yet he constructs beauty and design in there co-existence. A subtle concept, which suggests further interest in urban and natural surfaces.

Paul Adair