photosynthesis

Overview

Chris Grottick presented a video in Sharjah in 1998 at the museum, 'live' from a rainy part of the world. This dislocation of place interests him, as a technology of distance. Time is accelerated and compacted. For Grottick, this speed of life and the signifying gap as a place without the given linear significations of memory, is the future-anterior tense that describes the sublime. Ideally, this prescription would be uncritically accommodated, recorded and absorbed into the conscious subject's sense of location, but paradoxically must remain out of reach, elusive and subjectively unbearable. The technology of, I experience of such a distance is compressed as a space without parameters. Infinity supercedes the sign of closure. For Grottick, this is closer to the truth - as a limit of 'things'.

In 'Crowd Pieeser, a firework display is filmed from the crowd. It is a potent symbol of celebration, held at the moment of explosion. Something's wrong. Visitors cast a shadow on the screen and enH~F the frame, yet cannot fully enter into the spirit of things and must remain distanced. Time is distorted. A double-bind, both near and far alerts to the difficulty of perception in works that destable the 'moral' picture with which we sense and locate space. This leaves us without physical ground, especially of Nature's pastoral Eden promoted as the apocalyptic simulacrum. The apocalypse is the most long-running narrative of return and moral judgement. It connotes as 'bringing to the light'.

All these works discriminate between the ontologies of photography, film, video and the digital as an overlapped, reproductive cycle of image cultures. As a death cell that rampages perfectly ad Infinitum, it starts looking very pretty and out of control.

In 'Polysynthesis' photographs of houseplants are manipulated, hybridised beyond singular identities. The artist has answered a mail-out literally, "See your humble houseplant projected tree size in Clissold Park".

'Nature', as recorded by the artist re-vamped time lapse photography, is called back into question in a dissimilar vein, adjusted by a subtle 'unnatural' balance of advanced technology. Transfer and counter-transfer of passive and active enjoyment is re-drawn from TV memories of childhood. In the same way, wonder and bewilderment is layered onto panic-stricken crowd.

The register acknowledges what the Luddite fears with suspicion; as a pseudo-familiarity with the abstraction of engineered reality, perpetuated in home-entertainments.However, this genetic and digital collision produces its own laws of liberation beyond human angst. PL