KYLE ZETO | ‘PHASES’
A series called ‘Phases’ which I recently exhibited in a show called ‘On The Great Divide’ at Lo & Behold Gallery in London. While the photographs work better relating to the other works in the show physically, the concept runs alongs the lines of British folk history surviving as re-enactments, nostalgia or spectacle that often disappears and reappears (1960s folk revival being an obvious example). The reasoning for these resurgences is kind of murky, it could be a response to the increasing amount of digital information in society or an inherent desire for the past, a kind of ‘back-to-nature’ type longing, a desire that might not be so natural.
Words often fail to explain a so-called experience of wilderness or landscape. Many psychological theorems could be incanted to offer elucidation, perhaps habitat theory, as it would suggest the aesthetic pleasure is derived from the environment being favourable to certain human needs, perhaps shelter, sex, exploration and nurture. The Romantics took the concept of the sublime away from the old language, of religion and outmoded traditions. Burke located the sublime in the experience of the vastness and obscurity of nature and later Kant positioned it in a more psychological experience of man’s imaginative limits.
Is nature always subject to transformation into an emblem or a code? While you can’t apply anthropomorphism to nature visually and remain outside the realms of Disney, you can use symbolic constructions which ‘read’ the environment in a certain way. That is the characteristically romantic inclination to use landscape as an external representation of complex, internal psychologies.
© Kyle Zeto