‘Out of Sight’
Craig Andrews
3 – 26 February 2012
Open Wednesday to Sunday, 12noon – 6pm, or by appointment.
Private view: Thursday 2nd February, 6 – 9pm.
Continuing his journey from night to day, Craig Andrews plots the spaces which can co-exist between the here of space and the now of time.
In a wall of photographs taken of a dilapidated and about-to-be-demolished Liverpool department store (snatched as the light faded on the last day of trading) and in a bank of monitors showing footage filmed laboriously (and again secretly) over three long Winter/Spring months on the similarly derelict site of the 1984 ‘International Garden Festival’ (currently being made ready for a possible re-opening), Andrews brings our peripheral vision into the foreground.
The video images have a stillness which we seek to animate and the photographs move as we move away from them – in the corner of each someone has left the scene or may enter stage right. Out of site.
In the garden of course, nature re-asserts itself; paths are overgrown: one strand of our passage through time is erased while others appear. Graffiti on a Chinese pagoda brings in one trembling image a glimpse of a future dereliction. But this is not a ghost of a fore-warned apocalypse but a vision of simultaneity – stasis both in a moment and for an aeon.
Though entropy and decay may ostensibly be the subject matter, Andrews continues a timeline which has no certain end – mapping spaces (much more than liminal) which we occupy only temporarily; spaces in which only time itself seems to breathe. Not the time arrested to make or satisfy an image but the time that we accompany half-consciously while we are doing something else. Whatever a tree falling in the forest sounds like, this is how it looks.
As we construct or dis-assemble each shot, taking cues from horizon/sightline or subject matter, the camera prompts us and we naturally assume a place for ourselves within the spaces unseen – but Andrews seems to have found a particular no-man’s land where time and space can be felt. Uncrowded by too much of the ‘viewer’ or protagonist, the space between photographs is always at the back of our minds …
In the photographs cinematic space unfolds; in the videos it is held at bay as the picture-plane is enforced. Formally the work elides each medium’s presumed core, stillness and motion; emotionally the work posits a new past – a universal past, an im-personal history.
‘Here Space becomes Time’
Wagner ‘Parsifal’
‘Time … is waiting in the wings, he speaks of senseless things …
his trick is you and me, Boy’
David Bowie ‘Hunky Dory’
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For more information or images contact:
Michael Keenan on 07952 986 696