AFTER_image

Curated by Stephen Cooper & Kate Street

Artists: Larry Achiampong, Gabriele Beveridge, Bohyeon Bona Kim, Sasha Bowles, Stephen Cooper, Ben Cove, Tim Ellis, Astrid Klein, Jo Israel, John Stezaker, Kate Street, Sarah Kate Wilson, Ruth van Beek.

AFTER_image takes its cue from the infliction whereby an image continues to appear within the eyes after exposure to the original. It is a physiological reaction, however it can also be viewed as a psychological one where the image lingers within the mind’s eye. What is it about a certain image that stays with us, or resonates over and above itself? This exhibition brings together thirteen multidisciplinary artists who carefully select and reappropriate imagery from the visual chaos of global culture. Identifying with, and understanding, the potential for subversion within each frame. Through varying means of disruption, manipulation, construction and dissection, they restage images to create new dialogues or to focus our attention.

Appropriation and sampling of found imagery is at once a break with traditional forms of ‘making’ and paradoxically a now widely accepted contemporary process within art practices. Adopted in the ‘synthetic’ era through Picasso and Braque in their attempts to assemble disparate elements into a coherent whole, collage was the perfect vehicle for challenging established formats and ideologies around image making. It heralded a new modern approach to art utilising fragments of the world to formulate a commentary on it, rather than replicating it through a singular perspective. In his 1977 essay The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes puts forth the suggestion that writing eliminates all individual voice and point of origin because it happens within a creative process that is the practice of signification itself. It’s true origin is its form; therefore, the creator is more like a craftsman, who is skilled within this means rather than being the point of origin. Text, he argues, is composed of multiple writings brought into dialogue with one another and by refusing a singular ‘author’ there is a denial of assigning an ultimate reading, and instead we have a fluid set of meanings. But can this also be applied to contemporary art practice?

This genealogy of thought is more recently reinforced by Nicholas Bourriaud in his 2002 essay Postproduction, where he suggests that the modern day artist could be considered more as a DJ with their sampling of detritus from modern life, and raises the point that the quality of a work depends on the trajectory it describes in the cultural landscape. It constructs a linkage between forms, signs, and images (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 40). This is what binds the participating artists in AFTER_image – their awareness of the potentials within imagery when coupled, layered, punctured, assembled or represented. Within their varying fields of research comes a raft of differing sources – from Achiampong’s family archive that speaks from an intimate perspective about global/social issues of race and prejudice, through to Beveridge’s sun-faded hair salon advertisements that talk of the intimate care and how we manufacture ourselves to be represented publicly. These polemics of public/personal criss-cross through the exhibition and it is the linkage through construction and juxtaposition that is at the core of their concerns. In essence they become the curator within their own creative processes. Central to the show is the physical act of making in its various forms alongside the exploration of imagery – its origins, inherent associations and its afterlife in light of new meanings brought forth.