AIPAD, 2018

Serial Structures: The Object in Performance

For AIPAD 2018, JHB Gallery presents a selection of artists who examine concepts of seriality, movement, and the object in their work. These artists employ the object per se, in multiple ways, examining it as a subject, an idea and as an extension of the photograph itself. They create new spatial interventions by re-contextualizing the object either as a scene, a setting, a site, a landscape—or as a conceptual gesture.

Artists such as Ellen Carey and Amanda Means draw directly with light. Amanda Means, in this instance, does not use a camera to record an image. Instead, she works in the studio and darkroom, using light, and its interaction with photosensitive materials, to reveal her hands-on, physical manipulation of that material into a concrete, photographic object. Ellen Carey’s new body of work, Crush & Pull series (never exhibited before) combines Polaroid and photogram using the Polaroid negative to create new abstract forms and blended hues with experimental approaches and innovative process-driven methods located in: chemistryladen Polaroid pods and the light-tight color darkroom.

Nic Nicosia directly re-stages the object or scene to be photographed, whereby the very thing under observation is an elaborate stage set, transforming the photographs role and function, and thus the viewer’s experience and relationship to it. John Coplans, Simone Douglas, Yuki Onodera and Bohnchang Koo photograph the object, the body or site, giving it a second life as a representation. In this sense, the object-hood of the site or landscape has a derivative state as a photographic object—an object within an object.