| Exhibitions | Past Closer Still Rita Donagh, John Dougiill, Andrew Grassie, Beth Harland, Louisa Minkin, Simon Morley ArtSway: 17 March - 29 April 2001 Closer Still is an exhibition which brings together artists whose paintings enlarge upon a photographic source and as such may be seen as images of images. The photographic material remains as an impression in these works, a shadow of the original image rather than a direct representation of it. The exhibition was devised by painter Beth Harland who was invited to include her own work in the selection she made. The exhibition examines painting as an extension of the ordinary act of looking, a means of unpacking the density of information which a photograph can contain, a way of noticing aspects and details of an image which are otherwise overlooked. It looks at how the remaking of an image in paint can form part of a process of re-evaluating the events which that image seems to represent, and how events themselves may change our view of images whose significance once seemed fixed; the painted version of an image, it would seem, can sometimes be more open and responsive to this kind of shift, truer to the ambiguity of things, than can the photographs which are so often read as the epitome of historical reliability. Click here to return to Past Exhibitions menu. |