Joe Clark
Wednesday, 27 March 2013
Work from Shimmer at XPO Gallery.
“My work orbits the photographic image; testing my relationship to it by approaching it’s making and display from various formal and technical perspectives. Working across photographic genres, such as landscape and studio photography and making use of installational approaches and interactivity I unpick how images are made and received. There is either an explicit foregrounding of an apparatus which is present in the space, or markers left in the images to allow the method of production to be traced and understood. The tension that arises (and the real content of the work) is between this explication and the hanging question of what the works are really gesturing towards.
The works contain a unifying language which is highly suggestive of order and meaning, like a series of ikons or singularities encoded on to the subject matter and medium that evade absolute apprehension. This sense of a hidden order floating just beyond legibility is an experience common to both viewer and artist. There is a kind of grasping as I try to dredge images from my mind and shunt devices towards revealing them- tracing their perimeter with technical processes wielded with varying degrees of expertise by an untrained operator. An amateur leveraging professionalised tools and processes, trying to find a way to articulate something I consider to be ‘true’.” – Joe Clark