Cihuateotl's Myth by Octavio Garcia Alvarado. An Endless Horizon by Matthew James. Huw Davies Gallery. PhotoAccess at the Manuka Arts Centre. Until June 19.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Reviewer: Peter Haynes.
The artists in the current exhibitions have espoused photographic techniques far removed from the sophistication of contemporary digital technologies. Garcia Alvarado uses chemigrams, while James has developed a process that involves winding strips of slide film through a customised analogue camera. The results are varied but each artist provides other ways of making that lead to other ways of viewing "the photograph".
Garcia Alvarado's 10 photographs continue the exploration of his connections with the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico and Central America that was seen earlier this year at Form Gallery in Queanbeyan. The imagery remains the same – the skull-like face of Cihuateotl, a demon emanating from the soul of a woman who died in childbirth. The artist's chosen means is the chemigram, neatly described by Martyn Jolly, author of the accompanying text. Briefly it is a technique in which photographic paper is left in the light to react with the chemicals applied by the artist. The artist then manipulates the surface layers and in the doing opens them up to an array of possibilities, begun but not controlled by him. The resultant surface is activated in a visually rich way that simultaneously discloses and encloses the central image of the deity. This disclosure/enclosure produces an image that for me is very much like the photographs that archaeologists took of their discoveries of pre-Columbian stone statuary enveloped by the natural accretions of the jungle but nevertheless revealing their presence, a presence that obviously resonates with the artist.
Garcia Alvarado capitalises on the accidental effects produced to evoke a mysterious otherworldly aura. The central image emerges through the surrounding visual pentimenti and metaphorically speaks of the continuation of cultures through myth and memory, and the power of both of these in the creative imagination.
Matthew James's images of the ocean as seen from various sites (mostly) around Sydney are presented with a strident horizontality quietly underscored by the inclusion of an insistent central band of light that appears to hover between the marine and celestial terrains it traverses. It is a signifier of the depth of the relationship the artist (and vicariously his viewers) has with the ocean as a limitless and ever-present entity contrarily full of beauty and the power for destruction. James is interested in the artifice of the image, in how the artist captures the experience of the reality of actual apprehension with the natural world and transfers that two-dimensionally. The panorama that he adopts is not geographically constrained – beginning and ending are the same, open-ended, or indeed are they present at all? The question is posited aesthetically and tentative answers offered. His own experience of his confrontation with the ocean – the latter something ostensibly familiar and known to him since childhood - has left him accepting that full comprehension of the natural world as evinced in the ocean is not possible. If however comprehension is not possible, the ongoing confrontation and consequent amazement is. Expressing this is what his images are concerned with.
The preceding has clear resonance with Romantic notions of the Sublime and for me, one iconic image in particular. Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea (c.1809) was a radical departure from the usual early 19th-century landscape. Friedrich eschewed deep spatial configurations in favour of an almost abstract depiction of the broad expanse of the beach, the sea and the sky into which the minuscule figure of the monk is placed to mark the insignificance of man in the face of the natural world. Friedrich's spiritual relationship with his north German landscape prefigures the abstract evanescence of Mark Rothko and others. While that comparison is not markedly relevant here Mathews's images do hold a strong abstract quality that speaks of the challenge of visualising the intimately spiritual relationship he has with the sea. His "endless Horizons" capture the powerful beauty of the Pacific Ocean while expressing his awe at the beholding of it.
