FINALISING IDEAS FOR EXHIBITION [11/05/20]

What do I want to say within shown work? What will the audience gain from viewing work?

At this point in any exhibition preparation prior to the confirmation of any practical and physical decisions of how you display your work, I feel one of the most important steps that you undertake is the consolidation of ideas, and to take a moment for personal reflection in your own work and ideas throughout the creative journey. It's important that you choose the correct pieces of work that highlight and emphasise just what it is you're intending to say the best. The main focus point that we need to consider is the audience, and who will be viewing and experiencing our work. Personally, throughout this unit, I feel as though I have somewhat struggled to keep a central focus point when creating work, and as my ideas have been somewhat broad, it has thus been reflected in my practice and experimentation. However, saying this, within the final pieces I choose to exhibit for the exhibition, the main focus point the I want my work to suggest is surrounding the lack of materiality and physicality that is involved with the photographic medium in todays society. The current situation we all find ourselves in has come at a somewhat ironic time within my interests revolving around photography. Considering that fact that we are constantly dealing with, handling and experiencing images in the forms of digital files as opposed to physical prints. My work aims to provoke thought surrounding these factors. I have chosen to exhibit two aspects of my exploration in this area of thought and interest. The first being my initial exploration, utilising found digital images from sites such as Flickr and google images, that I then appropriated and reworked in the darkroom. The second aspect and point of exploration I want to display is the act of rephotographing of both these physical darkroom prints, and then cyanotype prints, bringing attention and highlighting current limiting and restricting factors we are facing when creating work.

I also want to bring attention to and comment of the abundance of images we take everyday, and the perhaps loss and lack of personal connection we have to the images as a result of this. Inspired and fascinated by both the works of Clare Strand, and Erik Kessels, I aim to portray this visually within my work. In the previous online tutorial, we discussed the possibility of experimenting with the process of physically printing these images, and then perhaps rephotographing these once again, or playing around with incorporating them in a virtual 3D way. However, unfortunately, my home printer was facing some difficulties, and therefore couldn't explore this idea physically. As an alternative, I therefore aim to include several of darkroom images presented directly below in a repeated pattern, to attempt to emphasise this repetition and consumption and abundance of images. I aim to display them 4X6, in order to fill the wall space with as many as possible. Furthermore, in doing so, it could be a point of reference to the size of images when they are in digital format, and shown on screens on platforms such as Flickr, google images and Instagram, again highlighting this digital consumption of imagery. As stand alone prints i feel they lack something when shown in a digital format, as opposed to if they were physical darkroom prints in a real exhibition. I therefore hope this extended idea of including multiple of the same image will reinforce my concept further.

In addition to displaying the darkroom prints, I aim to include the rephotographed images of those original prints. In the work displayed in the exhibition, i've decided I want to include features and aspects within my work that essentially aren't seen as conventionally 'perfect' and thus bring attention to such restrictions and possible difficulties faced when creating work in such unfortunate circumstances. I therefore have chosen to include those that include creased sheets, and that expose the studio set up i had to make do with in my home environment.