Curated by Harry Hardie of Foto8, Projected Landscapes brings together the work of four UK-based photographers: Aaron Schuman, Caroline Molloy, Kate Peters and Corinne Silva. Their work here plays with the idea of contemporary myth-making, based
in the real, yet alluding to imaginary landscapes, whether the projections of the photographer’s vision, the aspirations of material structures, or the visual language of particular spaces.
Aaron Schuman’s series, Once Upon a Time in the West, was photographed on the sets and locations of Sergio Leone’s 1960s spaghetti westerns. Schuman was fascinated by the notion that the American archetype of the Wild West, and its associations of freedom, independence, brutality, morality, honour was transposed by Leone to the landscape of Franco’s Spain.
Caroline Molloy has photographed the photo studios of Kerala, once an integral part of the vernacular language of studio photography, steeped in tradition and colonial history. These static pictorial spaces, now largely ornamental, symbolise an idealised fantasy, a space in which to fix yourself or your loved one for posterity.
Kate Peters image acts like a film still, suggesting a narrative and alluding to the history of a place while speaking the familiar language of cinema. The mundane is elevated here into a defining scenario.
Badlands, Corinne Silva's ongoing series, explores the border territory of Almeria, southeast Spain. Silva uses plastic to examine the authentic and artificial in a desert landscape shaped by the forces of economic migration, intensive agricultural development and tourism.
The photograph of ‘rocks’ made of crushed cars and fibreglass point to a sanitised desert playground on to which those who have the economic means project their desires. Silva’s work explores moments when fantasy invades reality. Her skill is in moving between the fabulousness of the simulacrum to the conditions that underpin its material existence.
07/11/09 -12/12/09
Monday to Friday 10.00–7.00, Saturday 10.00–3.00