"Image Support"
ANN CATHRIN NOVEMBER HØIBO
“IMAGE SUPPORT”
08.01.-14.02.2016 / BERGEN KUNSTHALL, BERGEN
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The exhibition "Image Support" deals in different ways with the "construction" of images, through exploring ideas about the production. the reproduction and reception processes in which the image is at all times included.
In the works of Eileen Quinlan and Lucas Blalock, photography is not only used to depict or document a reality outside the camera lens, but is also used as a technical tool where the image is created or located via photography's chemical or digital apparatus.
Quinlan processes the photograph by scratching directly into the analogue negative, or by exposing the film to corrosive chemical processes. In other works, she uses a scanner to produce a kind of "anti-abstraction" using mirrors and objects that are moved over the scanner's surface.
Blalock often begins with a staged tableau of objects in the studio (a kind of still life) which he photographs with analogue film, but which is subsequently processed digitally in editing tools such as Photoshop. Blalock's work thus occupies an ambiguous and complex position between analogue and digital photography.
Marieta Chirulescu and Ann Cathrin November Høibo work with media such as painting, sculpture and textiles, but these artists also deal with similar manipulation and production processes.
Chirulescu also uses scanners and digital editing tools as tools in his work process. In her large, minimalist canvases, the painting's media specificity is commented on, while the works contain a complex material layering where both a tactile materiality and virtual materials and pictorial spaces are put into play.
Høibo's works are in many ways the most sculptural in the exhibition, and explore the inherent materiality of a number of found and processed textiles, fabrics and objects. In her hand-woven carpets, one senses an improvised and personal, but at the same time almost mechanical production process. With the loom as a tool, a further image-creating "technology" is exposed, albeit more craft-based and manual-based.
Through their different studio-based work forms, all four artists find themselves in a borderland between creating images and locating images. The final work arises via a self-reflexive material exploration, a process that facilitates improvisation and exploration, and which allows coincidences and "mistakes" from the production to often become decisive for the image-making process. The material of a work of art is not only a physical foundation, or substructure (support) for an image, but in many cases this substructure constitutes both the image itself and the content of the work.
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Installation photography: Thor Brødreskift
