Struck By Light, 2021, Valid World Hall, EXP-21 International Festival, Curated by Megan Ringrose and Cristina Fontsare
From daguerreotype to cyanotype to polaroid to digital, light is the one thing that every photograph relies on for its creation. Photography’s talent for reproduction is such that we tend to ignore the object in favour of its subject, look past the material form, into the image. The artists in Struck by Light, an exhibition curated by Cristina Fontsaré and Megan Ringrose, produce photographs that counter this type of interaction. Working with a gamut of alternate processes, these artists take light and the materials and processes of photography as their subject, creating vibrant, often abstract, forms that invite the viewer to question what they are seeing.
Experimentation and play are crucial to how these artists work. For some, like Poppy Lekner, Liz Harrington, and Nettie Edwards, this takes place outdoors, using touch to ground the relationship between subject and image. Rather than standing before the camera, the subject – be it a loved one’s belongings or a vulnerable environment – makes physical contact with the light-sensitive material. Anna Luk and Emilie Poiret-Brown take these experiments into the darkroom, where they explore photography by pursuing qualities typically tethered to painting and sculpture. Megan Ringrose uses historical iron-based processes to link her camera-less images to the past using ultraviolet light as the subject in her series entitled ‘Light collage’. Ky Lewis relies upon time and chance. Her images depict trees, buildings and the path of the sun. These solargraphs were created using pinhole cameras loaded with water, seeds, and photographic paper and placed outside for sixty days, so that the plants grew towards the same sun these images record.
Struck by Light evolved from a Hundred Heroines online exhibition, sparked by Ellen Carey’s central question, ‘What is a twenty-first century photograph?’. Photography spent much of its adolescence concerned with truth and reality, the ethics of looking, and the fight to be accepted as an art form. The beginning of the twenty-first century brought these debates into the digital, querying whether sensors and pixels were a progression from analogue photography or a radical break with it. It’s interesting then that the photographers answering this call use largely analogue techniques in an often abstract approach, moving away from questions of representation towards what could be considered a new photographic modernism.
~ Excerpt from Photomonitor, Ish Doney
