Since the late 1990s Douglas has been committed to examining the complexities of perception and the ontology of vision. Primarily through the discipline of photography, the artist examines how light travels and through what medium. She questions how we experience light’s representation in the form of an “image,” comparatively to light as a “thing in itself.”
Curated by the RE-SITED collaborative Melissa Bianca Amore & William Stover, the exhibition Parallel Infinities examines the paradoxical beauty that emerges from the intersection and parallel tensions between light & darkness, sight & site and proximity & distance. The exhibition will feature a selection from two recent series Ever and After, alongside Douglas’ renowned Eternal Return works. These images highlight the artist’s interest in examining “transitional states” and the primordial forces that navigate the order of nature’s cyclical patterns, such as, fire, earth, sky, water and light.
The two bodies of works Ever and After trace the lights movement across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, with Ever being created with the Antipodean surrounding waters in Sydney and After in the Catskills. In the exhibition Parallel Infinities the two series, featuring both water and smoke–shadowing cloud-formations–fold and liquefy into a third in-between space. Where the horizon line meets in both hemispheres, in these works, both water and fire become a hybrid of traveling light and reform into an integrated landscape. “In the Australian context out of which my work emerged, the historical association of light and knowledge takes on a particular dimension,” says Douglas. “This distinction, perhaps, may represent something yet-to-be-known, an unknowing to be overcome.”
Created from combining the techniques and photographic processes of both photograms and negatives, Ever reveals “light” as an inversion of both water and smoke, and as an infinite expanse of blackness. “Ever contains light refractions formed in liquid darkness with the movement of water made visible by the light emanating from the sun,” Douglas remarks. In contrast, After reveals water as the primary source of life’s rotational and celestial movement. In both series, however, “light” becomes both blackness and lightness oscillating in constant motion. “Upon moving to New York, I made several trips to the Catskills to engage with the histories of water, land and light of the Hudson Valley,” says Douglas.
As a punctuation mark to the exhibition, the wooden sculpture, Promise (Site), acts as a metaphor for a “torn-open-spine of a book” (1) or the skeletal structure of a boat, both functioning as a carrier of our collective histories and culture. Readdressing the question of how culture is transported and re-contextualized in distinct locations, Douglas’ practice also raises questions about authenticity and the politics of “image making,” and the activity of “seeing.” “Photographs are of something. Working with various photographic approaches allows me to consider the slippage between the real as perceived and the representational power of the photographic image and its evasive status,” Douglas says. “I wish to make visible a laggard oscillation between the recognizable and the abstract, questioning indexicality that is commonly seen as a condition of the medium.”
