Flowers Gallery
20.05.2015 - 27.06.2015
© Hannah Whitaker, Arctic Landscape (Trees), 2014
Defined as a process of transformation, Metamorphosis presents the work of three artists who explore the possibilities for evolution within the photographic medium.
Images are interfered with, fragmented, punctured, spliced and sewn - undergoing a compositional and physical change. The exhibition looks at their varied and expansive processes, from the ‘in-camera’ light based and systematic interventions of Hannah Whitaker, to the hybrid collage works of Ruth van Beek, and the embroidered and embellished found photography of Julie Cockburn. The artists are linked by their manipulative artistic strategies, their material experimentation, and by the sense of alchemic exploration that occurs in their photographs.
Hannah Whitaker employs a system of masking in her photographic works that interrupts the mechanical process of exposure. Whitaker’s images are subjected to a process of layering moments in time and space - shooting through hand cut paper screens inserted into the camera, and with multiple exposures. Set within the physical parameters of her 4x5 negatives, Whitaker constructs closed repetitious systems and geometric grids. The screens divide
the space of the photograph into distinct pictoria frameworks - representation and abstraction, flatness and dimensionality, patterning and chance. These overlapping visual
languages allow the photographs to operate within systems external to them, whether mathematical, musical, digital, or
linguistic, granting the photographs agency beyond their status as formal configurations.
© Ruth van Beek, Untitled from The Arrangement, 2012 and New Arrangements, 2014, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London & Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam
Ruth van Beek assembles photographic arrangements from her archive of found material, such as snapshots, old books and newspaper cuttings. Within the archive, images are constantly reordered and decontextualised, giving life to unexpected new combinations. Her tactile two-dimensional works reveal the intimate history of their construction, with visible cuts and folds, and a shifting awareness of scale and texture.
Employing the illusory motifs found in studio photography, such as plain backdrops, pedestals and shadows, van Beek’s collages suggest the fusing of hidden realities beyond the façade of the photographic plane. Resembling mysterious archaeological discoveries or rare hybrid organisms, van Beek’s creations take on credible new forms, with a life of their own.
Reassembling, stitching into and over-painting studio portraits from the 1940’s and 1950’s, Julie Cockburn transforms the heads and shoulders of the sitters. Concealing certain elements of the original, Cockburn’s vivid woven embellishments reveal new imaginative possibilities, generating what has been described as a “counter-image” (Jonathan P Watts).
© Installation view
© Julie Cockburn, Veneer, 2015
Using a cut and splice technique, Cockburn’s fragmentation of the image is a powerful play on the illusion of representational space. She re-orders the composition of the photograph, without adding to or removing any of the original. Despite the precise nature of her interventions, her response is imaginative and internal, as Cockburn says: “making tangible the emotions that are invoked in me by the people or places in the found images.”
ARTIST’S BIOS
Hannah Whitaker is a New York based artist and photographer. She received her BA from Yale University and her MFA from the International Center of Photography/Bard College. Whitaker is a contributing editor for Triple Canopy, she has co-curated The Crystal Chain, a group exhibition at Invisible Exports, and co-edited Issue 45 of Blind Spot. She has shown her work at Thierry Goldberg Gallery and Casey Kaplan, New York; Pepin Moore, Los Angeles; and internationally.
Ruth van Beek lives and works in Koog aan de Zaan, The Netherlands. She graduated in 2002 from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam following a Masters Degree in photography. Her work has been presented in several solo and group exhibitions in Amsterdam; Antwerp; Berlin; Austin; New York; and Beijing. In 2013, she was selected as one of British Journal of Photography’s 20 photographers to watch. In 2011 she published her first book The Hibernators at RVB books in Paris, followed by her second publication The Arrangement in 2013.
Julie Cockburn lives and works in London, UK. She studied at Chelsea College of Art and Central St Martins College of Art and Design and has exhibited extensively in the UK, Europe and the United States, including the Arnhem Museum, Arnhem, NL; and BALTIC 39, Newcastle. She was the recipient of the Selectors’ Prize for the Salon Art Prize 2010. Her work has also been selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in both 2007 and 2010 and the John Moores Painting Prize 2012. Her work is included in the collections of Yale Center for British Art; The Wellcome Collection; British Land; Caldic Collection; Pier 24; and Goss-Michael Foundation; as well as numerous private collections.