The Substance of Shadows

My print exhibition opened this summer on June 6th on the occasion of a conference entitled 'The Stephen Bann Effect' to celebrate Stephen Bann's substantial impact on the state of Art History today. The show will be up for a year and can be found at 43 Woodland Road in the Resource Centre in the Department of History of Art at Bristol University.

Here is a taster of my ideas behind the exhibition:

The Substance of Shadows: Prints, Shadows and Memory

The Substance of Shadows is an exhibition drawn from the Department of History of Art’s print archive. The archive is characteristic of the varied, eccentric and often serendipitous nature of print collecting. Whether the prints are sought, found by chance or donated, they tell a particular tale about the accumulative process of collecting, of the organisation of memories into histories.

The six prints exhibited are in many ways disparate, spanning two centuries, produced for different purposes and varying in subject matter and style. Yet they have one thing in common: shadows. Ranging from strong cast shadows to delicate tonal shading, from the dark and the harrowing to the understated and idiosyncratic, shadows add visual and emotional resonance to the images. They may be used to convey the illusion of space and volume or to imply a particular narrative by symbolic association. Taken metaphorically as imperfect cast repetitions, shadows can be understood as analogies for the technical process of print production and for the creative mechanisms of making and disseminating memory.

As echoes of an original, shadows, prints and memories have an ambiguous relationship with their source (whether a solid object, artwork, printing block, or experience). They are defined by the aura of their source, in relation to which they are inextricably linked and yet physically separate. The transformative effect of repetition causes shifts in meaning and interpretation. The shadow has been thought of as a ‘double’, sometimes less than a detailed reflection, at others more revealing of the true, often malignant, essence of the object or person by which it is cast. The inexact reproduction of a printed image, and its distribution, allows a single copy to be viewed in relation to an infinite array of other images. A memory sees an experience imperfectly repeated and reconstructed by the subconscious. It is fundamentally affected by other memories we accrue over the years. As replicas of something else, shadows, prints and memories take on a life of their own through their dissemination and rearrangement in other contexts, combinations and collections. By nature suggestive and incomplete, these impressions intensify with the defining inflection of life lived, time passed, art and images seen, juxtaposed and reconfigured.

Photographs of the prints in situ and the accompanying catalogue (beautifully designer by Wilf Whitty at Radio Type) to follow.