The images above are the front and back of the invitation postcard. Following is the exhibition press release. (Crikey - what a train of speculative thoughts and information to bombard visitors with! Yet after reading this indulgent polemic a friend suggested I should apply to do a Fine Art PhD at Kingston University - something I had never contemplated as a possibility since graduating from Goldsmiths in 1990 with a 2/2. My PhD - Screen as Landscape - helped to clarify some of the ideas outlined below in rough-and-ready form in 2007.
bowartstrust
thenunnery
183 Bow Road
London E3 2SJ
www.bowarts.org
Across the Water
Symbolism in the digital wilderness
Paintings by Dan Hays
24 November–23 December 2007
Friday-Sunday 12-5pm, or by appointment
Private view: Friday 23 November, 6-9pm
Modernism’s emblematic grid is now the ubiquitous matrix through which we perceive digital information. The grid’s ambiguous nature, offering a sense of the scientific at the same time as the metaphysical, is virtually all we have, and it’s almost entirely subliminal.
Collectively titled Colorado Impressions, my paintings are concerned with the intentions of Impressionist painting and the mechanics of digital image compression down to the pixel level. An interest in the immateriality of digital imagery and the screen, combined with painting’s traditional focus on the paradox of representing light in coloured substance is at the core of the project. These meticulous and mediated reproductions of low quality images are necessarily flawed, claiming back for paint fragments from the infinity of digital photographs on the Internet.
The title Across the Water suggests many things. In the context of previous work, it most directly refers to the land of the New World across the Atlantic Ocean. Another Dan Hays, living in Colorado USA, was discovered through an Internet search in 1999. His website consists of numerous photographs of the Rocky Mountain landscape surrounding his home, as well as a live web-cam. With his permission a series of oil paintings derived from this imagery was embarked on, exploring the distortions of low-resolution and image compression. Visual material is now collected from across the whole of Colorado, and it’s essential to the project that it has never been physically visited. Colorado is a mythic place, the land of COLOR. Indeed, it is from a metaphysical and romantic standpoint that recent work has increasingly engaged with the subject.
Across the Water suggests Northern European mythology, in particular the Isle of the Dead, a subject tackled by romantic painters of the nineteenth century, such as Arnold Böcklin. The River Styx in Greek mythology could also be considered in this light. This touches on the very personal experience of losing my father last year. Bill lived in the pine-clad mountains of the Auvergne region of France for the last twelve or so years with his second wife Catherine. The influence of this landscape has been profound on my development into the landscape genre. Approaching equivalent landscapes from Colorado over the last eight years through the medium of the Internet and a namesake has been an act of emotional dislocation and intensification, with the physical experience of the Auvergne landscape a silent, grounding, influence – even if it’s another adopted land. My dad’s ashes were scattered into one of the tributaries of the River Loire.
Shepherd, across the water,
you are scarcely having a good time,
sing baïlèro, lèro
Scarcely, and you sing
baïlèro, lèro!
Shepherd, how will you cross?
Over there is the wide stream,
sing baïlèro, lèro!
Wait for me, I’m coming to look for you,
baïlèro, lèro
Translated folk song, Baïlèro, from Songs of the Auvergne, orchestral arrangement by Joseph Canteloube.
Romantic association with Tennyson’s symbolist poem The Lady of Shallot can also be considered. She is cursed to reside in an island castle on a river, only viewing the world through a mirror, ‘to weave the mirror's magic sights’ into the form of a tapestry. The tale was also the subject of 19th Century painters such as John William Waterhouse and William Holman Hunt. The poem is often read as an allegory for the work of an artist and the dangers of personal isolation as opposed to direct experience.
Symbolist painters of the late nineteenth century concerned themselves with images of windows:
“As a transparent vehicle, the window is that which admits light – or spirit – into the initial darkness of a room. But if glass transmits, it also reflects. And so the window is experienced by the symbolist as a mirror as well – something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated being. Flowing and freezing; glace in French means glass, mirror, and ice; transparency, opacity, and water. In the associative system of symbolist thought this liquidity points in two directions. First, towards the flow of birth – the amniotic fluid, the “source” – but then, towards the freezing into stasis or death – the unfecund immobility of the mirror.”
Rosalind Krauss, Grids, 1979 (from The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Popular Myths, MIT Press)
Today that mirror/window has its equivalent in the TV or computer screen, with elemental associations to the flood of images generated by the Internet (the digital wilderness, to romanticise), and the fluidity of the space between the virtual and actual. Below the shimmering surface of the screen there are a multitude of invisible agencies in the generation of what comes to our perception, suggestive of the spectral realm. These range, for example, from the complex and often arbitrary cataloguing processes of search engines down to the abstracting effects of data compression and corruption. Veracity, transience, expression, timelessness, physicality, uniqueness, and all qualities that are used to explore the entwined relationship of painting and photography are dissolved by a medium that can both simulate painterly effects and function as an impartial collector of information.
Claude Monet’s late water lily paintings represent the screen and its complexities. The surface of the water abstractly reflects plants around the pond and the sky and supports floating clumps of vegetation. The subject functions as an allegory of painting: we have the actuality of paint on the surface and the illusory, reflected, space beyond, the heavens, or below in the shadowy depths. The viewer is left floating.
The Sea of Solaris, described in Stanislaw Lem’s novel, is another watery link to notions of the digital and virtual, a generator of perfect simulations.
The digital realm is a shadowy, ethereal, parallel world - an endlessly refracted trace of humanity. We can only engage with a few fugitive images that emerge, half frozen, from this endlessly reproducible, unverifiable, and immaterial source. The analogy is memory.
We are lost to the garden, removed from nature, and painting operates as a technique to reconnect to the primal, a way of transforming representations back into physical objects.
Selected recent exhibitions:
2007-8 In Monet’s Garden – The Lure of Giverny, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, USA; Musée Marmottan, Paris.
2007 Deliverance, Void Gallery, Derry (solo).
Still Life, Still, T1+2 Gallery, London.
2006 Impressions of Colorado, Manchester Art Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery, Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham (solo), funded by Arts Council England, with accompanying catalogue.
Twilight in the Wilderness, Platform, London (solo).
Works in the exhibition with some notes:
All the paintings are oil on canvas and produced over the last two years.
Colorado Impressions 16a, 16b, 16c and 16d are derived from a single photograph of a silhouetted pine forest. The simple form of a sun or moon has been superimposed over an image largely made up of digital noise. Here notions of the sublime, and a reverence for the Hudson River school painters of the 19th century, are glimpsed through a heavily filtered and crudely reconstituted web-cam picture, playing with the filmic idea of shooting ‘day for night’. The colour of the sun in 16b is taken from Monet’s Impression Sunrise. The moon in 16c is exactly mid grey in tone, as is the darkest area in 16a. 16d threatens to cross over completely into the realms of science fantasy – a cosmic egg.
Dan Hays and Self-Portrait were painted in tandem, reinterpreting a cropped photographic self-portrait that Colorado Dan sent in 2001. They are identical in terms of application of paint, except that they are mirror images. Questions of authorship, authenticity and uniqueness are touched on, echoed by the other works in the exhibition, where mirroring and multiplication are the dominant formal concerns.
Colorado Impression 13a (Pike’s Peak & US Air-Force Academy) is painted in a technique that ended up looking like low quality printed material, a giant picture postcard. The academy, near Colorado Springs, was established on April 1, 1954. Their website is a seamless, amnesiac’s dream: www.usafa.af.mil
Transcendental Meditations shows a person dressed as Yogi Bear tackling the rapids in a rubber dingy in Royal Gorge, Colorado, USA. The original extremely low-resolution digital image came from the website for Yogi Bear’s Royal Gorge Jellystone Park™ Camp Resort. Yogi Bear from the Hannah Barberra cartoons is not related in any way to yogis in India, except by name. He was a fond caricature of a famous American baseball commentator, Yogi Berra, noted for his dry wit and aphorisms. The distinctly urbane character of Yogi Bear in the fictional Jellystone Park (play on Yellowstone) is the joke; he is anything but wild. This leap from Yogi Bear to Transcendental Meditation (yoga) tangentially suggests the New England Transcendentalists of mid-nineteenth century America. The leading voice of this group was Ralph Waldo Emerson who preached a return to nature and an appreciation of the near, the low and the common instead of the sublime and beautiful. Emerson's ideas represented the American development of the ideas of European Romanticism, embodied by Goethe and Friedrich. Henry David Thoreau put Emerson's ideas into practice in the writing of Walden, where he gave a simple account of a return to nature when he went to live alone in the woods of New England for a year in 1845, on the shore of Walden Pond. This work was a big influence on Mahatma Ghandi's living experiments in South Africa in the early twentieth Century (a curious link back to India). A person dressed as Yogi Bear, tackling the rapids of a river in Colorado, is a representation of the desire to return to nature and the inability to do so from a late capitalist perspective. The fact Yogi is smiling reveals a sincere intention to keep on trying to transcend the restrictions and distortions of a digitised world, indeed, with a belief that the nature of things is coming closer to the surface (of the canvas or screen). Digital sublimation is achieved.
Origin/Oblivion is a new manifestation of a person dressed as Yogi Bear, seen gliding gently across a Monet lily pond towards his double. The title came from the large graphic ‘O’ that the two yogis form – a giant zero (zero being the origin of mathematics, both something and nothing). The painting pays oblique homage to Monet and also to my father. There’s a meteorological term when a weather system peters out: ‘losing its identity’. My dad religiously watched the weather forecast, both French and British, and would repeat the words to himself and those present through his slow decline in health, a kind of existential portent. He would occasionally tell a childhood story of a family trip in a small boat on a river. His mother calmly challenged his frantically rowing father about which arch of an upcoming bridge they were going to go through, as wild eddies and currents threatened to smash the boat to smithereens. “We’re going under the arch the boat is going under!” was the exasperated response.
Colorado Snow Effect 4 is a play on Impressionism and Pointillism. Snowscapes are black and white - or at least the absence of colour, so long as the sky is grey, is not immediately apparent in many cases. Here the scene is depicted with painted pixels of pure saturated colour. From a long distance they merge into a black and white image. These paintings play with ideas of ‘snow’ on a TV screen, the noise between channels.
A selection of old postcards from Colorado acquired over the Internet will accompany the exhibition. Also a print entitled Diversion: Isle of Dogs, produced in 1997, which has formal links to current works, even if it maps somewhere closer to the Nunnery.
Exhibition photos:
