Episode: an exhibition of new lens-based work by 9 London-based artists

‘Episode’ is a collaboration between venues and universities aiming to provoke new research into how artworks both establish and interrogate our experiences of belief in western contemporary culture.

Selected for this exhibition by the curators because of his work in the field of lens-based media, Ingham was one of nine artists included in the show. A key interest of the project was to examine the politics of experience when the orthodox distinctions between fact and fiction are broken down or are superseded by experience itself. Rather than reiterate a crisis of recognition between these categories, as many philosophical discourses and arts practices have done and still do, this exhibition attempts to establish and identify new findings about how these experiences reformulate and shape comprehension of the normative and stable territories of fact or truth.

Ingham aimed to articulate some of his concerns with autobiographical memory and photographs. The exhibition was set within a simple but dynamic installation of floating white laminated screens that encouraged and, guided as well as inhibited the audiences’ movement around the gallery space.

Mark Ingham

Biography

Mark Ingham is visual artist and has been making work and researching into ideas of autobiographical memory and photographs for the last 7 years. He is a visiting lecturer and is a PhD Director of Studies Supervisor at Wimbledon School of Art. He is also a Senior Lecturer in the Architecture, and Design Department at The University of Greenwich and is a Visiting Lecturer two days a week on the MA and BA at Ravensbourne. He has exhibited widely, most recently at in an Arts Council funded solo show at Dilston Grove London, where he showed 120 SLR cameras which he converted into slide projectors.

His BA was in Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art and went to the Slade School of Fine Art for his postgraduate studies. He was awarded the Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He studied for a PGCE in Art and Design at the Institute of Education, London and has been a visiting lecturer in numerous art colleges for 25 years and was an education officer at the Whitechapel Art Gallery for four years. He is the External Examiner for the BA Graphic Design Department at London Metropolitan University.

Research Statement
The Research and the work is made up of a number of installations that use SLR cameras and an LED light source to create projection apparatuses that use transparencies from his grandfather's collection of 5,000 photographs and other sources. They are attempts to create a sense of memories being fuzzy narratives that can constantly change and be changed. This project consists of approximately 360 camera slide projectors made by using LED light bulbs.

When he started to use SLR cameras as projectors he wrote, 'In a blackened out room light from a torch shines through a slide and on through the back of a backless old camera. A transparent, fleeting image captured by this same camera many years ago projects outwards from it. A white wall intervenes, to reveal a glowing circle of dappled coloured light. The lens of the camera/projector focuses the image. Caught in this fragile world a young boy somersaults and hovers forever above an icy cold swimming pool. Another camera clicks, another photograph is taken.' He felt that a strange loop occurred whereby what once had been captured from the world was projected back into the world using the same apparatus, and then recaptured, light being the means of both its exposure and revelation.

These projected photographic images are an exploration into experiences of remembering and forgetting. They are attempts to evoke a form of 'paramnesia', whereby fantasy and reality collapse to create a sense of déjà vu. Photographs are, like memories, a testament to our complex and elusive past. This idea that photography has altered our perception of the past, and even the perception of time itself, is central to this work. Photographs are seen as a living ghost of the past, here and not here at the same time, which creates a fundamental shift in the way the world is perceived and conceived. These camera projectors are an attempt to make manifest some of these ideas and will attempt to illuminate further ideas about the relationships between photographs and the construction of our autobiographical memories.

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