Featured photographer
Kevin Newark
My practice resonates around the themes of space, time, anxiety and displacement.
In photographing discarded plastic carrier bags found in the canals of
East London, I looked to find some solace for the exiled soul of the plastic
bag. After short, useful lives, discarded plastic bags enter into a perpetual
state of retirement, their spent utility a metaphor for our own mortal
anxiety, whereas the demise of plastic is a distant, uncertain prospect.
The moment of disclosure (cognition) is delayed to induce a sense of disorientation
allowing the viewer to disassociate themselves from the dogma of optical
faith.
Their boundaries of scale can be breached in our allegorical thoughts
allowing these photographs to be equally expandable or retractable; the
electromagnetic imaging of micro-science and the radio imagery of space
are seemingly alike; the Petri dish and the cosmos. Weightlessness engenders
a separation of lightly form that permits a new relationship with dimensions
in space. Dissociation from the atmosphere allows these tormented, utilitarian
forms the serenity of an embalmed, opaque nirvana where they feign organic
structures yet remain veiled with a radiant toxicity.
Kevin newark has been commissioned by Pavilion to produce a new body of
work
for exhibition as part of the Pavilion
Commissions Programme 2008.
