Modeling the Sublime
Mark Durden
One of Tess Hurrell’s photographs from an earlier series, Haiku, is a square black and white photograph showing a portable blank screen, the kind that was once used for home-movie projections or slideshows. The screen is illuminated by an Anglepoise lamp, which provides the sole source of lighting for the photograph itself. The photograph hides nothing, and offers a closed loop in the relationship set up between its objects. But at the same time, this simple, eloquent photograph speaks about a whole experience of images that are now often seen as archaic and obsolete. There is something subtly assertive about earlier modes of photographic display and presentation, and their continued persistence and value here. The void of the blank screen might also be seen to offer a reflective pause in the face of the fast trafficking of images that characterises this photograph’s contemporary context. In the series of black and white photographs that make up Drawing Light we view things from the other side of the screen, back projections whose play of light and shadow sets up an enticing and alluring spectacle, some suggestive of cosmic explosions and solar eclipses. We move away from the particularity of objects and things rendered by photography— the dated look of the equipment in the photograph from Haiku. The paper screens in Drawing Light serve to diffuse and filter light, magically transforming the various objects and materials that are illuminated behind them. The series stems from an initial interest in what Hurrell has referred to as: the human response to shine and sparkle, and how this is used in Western culture to signify desire and magic. She suggests that [p]erhaps the origins of this wonder lies in observing stars, the sun and their reflections, alluding to vast distance and beauty in the unknown.
Wonderment, allure and a sense of magic are integral to these recent photographs. They also seem to signal a deliberate and knowing retrospective photographic turn. The fact that they are hand-printed black and white prints makes a statement about older technology and processes, and the values associated with them. The abstract forms of light evoke Modernist photographic experimentation, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s photograms especially. They are also suggestive of afterimages, and call up the whole optical experiments that prefigured photography’s invention. The afterimage becomes meaningful in the way these photographs are not about outward vision, but suggestive of something internal, subjective. While what these photographs stand for is far removed from the digital realm, they are however ‘virtual’, in their lack of corporeality, their lack of dirt and texture, their filtering of the real. This gives them a certain relation to the work of such 1980s Simulationist painters as Jack Goldstein and Peter Halley. It is a turn against the real, and the attention given to the play of surfaces that becomes relevant and significant to ‘what is going on’ in these contemporary photographs by Hurrell. We see the process of abstraction and the translation of objects into forms of light and shadow. These photographs are insubstantial and anti-photographic, especially when set against photography’s predominantly realist history.
Hurrell conjures up an art of radiance and wonder, at the same time she allows us to see how the photographs are constructed. We cannot get fully immersed in these displays because of the interruptive details showing; the studio floor beneath, or the wires and clips that hold the screens. In her earlier series Chaology, Hurrell constructed sculptural models that, when photographed, looked like explosions. The beautiful spectacles of destruction were photographic tricks, illusory. There is a similar play with the real in Drawing Light — the awkward relation between the disruptive details that signal the photograph’s artifice and the sublime possibilities of the light shows upon the screens. In Drawing Light the purity of abstraction is spoilt by the disclosure of the artifice, and the ordinariness and commonplace in the selection of materials used in the photograph’s construction. The lighting effects are created using simple makeshift objects, and in doing so this highlights a sense of improvisation, something that is integral to this series. The sublime and spectacular is conjured from quotidian objects. This lack of sophistication becomes particularly significant in its opposition to the complexity associated with new image technologies. The formation of the light shows can themselves be seen as setting up a relation to the analogue photographic process, with the screens functioning like light-sensitive film. It is here that there is a significant shift away from the realm of the Simulationist art of Peter Halley. His day-glo abstract art was made in response to the new sublime created by the computer screen. Halley differentiated his practice from the abstract forms of the Minimalists, whose art originated in industrial production and a physical relation to materials. In contrast, Halley’s art was made in response to a post-industrial age, marked by the de-realising effects of the ascendancy of signs and images over material things. That context has not gone away; indeed one might say it has become ever more pervasive. But it is precisely in such a climate that the handmade little photographic light shows Hurrell has created start to make so much sense.