You might find yourself

You might find yourself was my second solo exhibition at Theodore:Art, in September 2013. Here is the press release:

The transparency of the commercial image relies on the photographer’s ability to utilize the appropriate image codes for the particular genre he or she is working in – a form of image pronunciation. When, either deliberately or otherwise, these codes are transgressed, the image snags, and the viewer becomes aware of its constructed nature.

Sea of Green (The Enunciation of Images), [now re-edited as Mud & Milk] takes its title from a 1945 Time magazine editorial that described the aftermath of the Trinity Nuclear Tests in New Mexico, in which silica in the desert sand was turned into green liquid by the great heat from the blast. Sea of Green concerns the transformation of material: from liquid to solid, solid to liquid, and the odd, almost fugitive physicality of the 3D image. Featured in the video slideshow are found 1950s stereo (3D) slides depicting chocolate, furniture room-sets and opticians’ stereoscopic viewing tests alongside Paul’s own studio still lives, which depict “splash” vases. Voices instruct as to the proper pronunciation of words and sounds, but the conjunction of sound and image (as in yolk/yoke) expresses the limitations of the spoken word. Conversely, the emphasis on mimetic relationships between the images undermines their original intention as informational and transparent. Although not depicted, Harold Edgerton’s images of milk splashes and mushroom clouds hover at the edge of the viewer’s consciousness.

Stationery Flowers recall 1980s advertising images of electronic products, with flowers replacing calculators, faxes or answering machines. The perspective-grid backgrounds invest the flowers with an anachronistic futurism, and - through their association with the product shot - point to the flowers' double nature as nature/commodity.Mimic, Rolling Rock and Dimple are still lives constructed through material resemblance rather than symbolic or “natural” relationships, their mimetic qualities enhanced by the illusion of 3D via lenticular screens.