Sun to Sun 3 – 27 September 2014 Artereal Gallery
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CHRISTOPHER BUCKLOW & SIMONE DOUGLAS SUN TO SUN 3 – 27 SEPTEMBER 2014 ARTEREAL GALLERY ! YOUR INVITATION TO ATTEND THE EXHIBITION OPENING OF CHRISTOPHER BUCKLOW & SIMONE DOUGLAS / SUN TO SUN ON 3 SEPTEMBER 2014 FROM 6-8PM JOIN US FOR AN ARTIST TALK WITH SIMONE DOUGLAS ON SATURDAY 6 SEPTEMBER 2014 AT 3PM ARTEREAL GALLERY / 747 DARLING ST, ROZELLE NSW 2039 WWW.ARTEREAL.COM.AU #1 Q&A with Christopher Bucklow & Simone unconscious impels the work to be made, but it is not Douglas party to its motives and meanings right away. And what the rational mind is really doing when you talk about your ideas at that moment, is trying to come up with a BD What brought you together? convincing hypothesis of what the energy behind the creation of the work is. And on the whole, you believe CB We met in 1994 after I saw Simone’s work when yourself! But I’ve been doing it too long now, to I was on a selection panel for The Photographers Gallery completely believe that line – I know myself better now. in London. I thought her work was very beautiful and So I’d have to say light was originally about feeling. powerful. At the time, I was working at the V&A museum, and we acquired Simone’s work for the national But there was always something else in the collection. background, and that was to do with how light behaves in the Double Slit Experiment. Even as a teenager I found SD We met in 1994 following my solo exhibition it curious that the fact that light is both particle & wave ‘Aberrations’ at The Photographers Gallery in London. and matter & energy, probably connected with a sense Chris was on the selection committee as part of his role that I was both a body and a soul. And that in some way, as Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Victoria & both are one. The particle-wave duality never really made Albert Museum in London. Ruth Charity, the curator at sense to me, nor the body-mind duality. Light was clearly The Photographers Gallery, suggested that I meet Chris. I neither particle nor wave, just showing up as one or the was profoundly mesmerised by his images and his way of other if looked at in a certain way. But in reality it is working with light and the sun. It was the start of a long actually one phenomenon that cannot be properly conversation - one that has continued across countries apprehended on this plane, or with this vehicle, the and hemispheres. human psycho-somatic entity. The choices I made about using light in the way that I have must have been coloured by these kinds of feelings. BD Light is integral to both your practices. Can you elaborate on its significance? SD It is as simple and as complex as this; It is the universe in return. CB Initially, I think I turned to light as a natural metaphor for feeling. I’m talking with hindsight here. The But if I had to expand further… Photography, a sun is a self-luminous body. It was how I felt about the contemporary medium of light, has been in revolution phenomenon of the human mind as a phenomenon of since its inception. Even before it existed, the idea of it, the world. My work with the sun began in 1991 and I the holder of light, was a radical departure from the way thought about solar work in a different way back then. If we saw ourselves and the world around us. In the most you had asked me this same question at that time, I remote, darkest part of our universe, there is still light. would have answered that light and the sun were natural Consider the now famous image made using the Hubble symbols of language or logos. I was interested in what I Telescope. Pointed into the darkest area of space and called the ‘linguistic body’; the cultural information that is exposed for days, light traveling for an incomprehensible poured into the human from birth onwards. You see it in period of time was arrested on the photographic plate. various mythologies across the world. Within the Christian What a beautiful conundrum it caused. The light at the myth for example, you see it in the baptism ceremony original source no longer existed, but it did exist some where the priest holds a candle to the child’s face multitude of light years away in time, and part of that symbolizing the entry of the child into the cult, and the light came to rest in the photograph. To hold light. That entry of language – the Word – into the child. I won’t most crucial, ephemeral, spiritual, pragmatic holder of deny that, that is part of the Guest series, but it’s funny life itself. The paradox. how work tends not to be wholly about the things you thought it was about right at the beginning. It’s as if the BD Chris, you have been described as a CB Well this connects well with my last point. I feel “pillar of the camera-less photography that in art anything chosen by the artist to be in the work movement” and Simone, you utilize a variety of is symbolic of the human, or some aspect of the psyche. equipment and techniques… So while there are figures in my work, to me the spaces of Simone’s work are aspects of the human too. The CB Yes, the metaphors inherent within my camera- landscape of the Australian interior is human, it’s a less technique are important in this body of work. Having metaphor for a state of mind, almost a zen-like field of no negative and having the actual sun touch the final ‘being’ rather than a collected ‘particle’ of individual print was important to me. Art historians have a word for consciousness. This can represent a wish or an actuality it; they call it indexicality – the impression of the subject, of mind. Didn’t the early settlers believe there was in almost like a fossil, onto the paper. Ultimately it is about inland sea within central Australia? I too think there is an metaphors to do with the sense of touch rather than inland sea. The sea of the unconscious. I feel that is sight, like the relics of Saints or St Lucy’s handkerchief where Simone is attracted so that here spaces are all with the impression of Christ’s face upon it after it was human to me. used to wipe his brow. Or the Turin shroud, which is probably the best known example. My motives for SD The human figure is present in my work by its connecting with this tradition would have originally had to absence. But that is to limit what might be constituted as do with a sense that reason and ego-consciousness is the figure - as Chris identifies. not the sole ‘universe’ of the psyche. I think I intuited the presence of a parallel universe, one that the conscious Landscape existing and mythical is a human ‘universe’ floated within like a bubble, the vast universe understanding. We are always in relationship to it, in it. In of the unconscious. The indexical camera-less technique fact I write this from the geological remains of the inland allowed the world – nature, to record itself tangibly. But sea near Broken Hill, the remote desert, above the you would have to realize, to understand this properly, interior hidden sea and under that epic sky. It’s powerful that the ‘world’ or ‘nature’ would be symbolizing or a land and has informed my work for over a decade. My metaphor for, the non-ego. presence, the body, is ephemeral against time. If you like, the ‘absence’ of the body is photographic. Like the SD The camera is one of the conduits of light that I swift passing of light and shadow, it occurs but it is not use towards the making of the final images/ work. So I visually held - “the sea of the unconscious.” move between analogue, digital (but not Photoshop) and light itself. I don’t use camera-less as a word as it implies When I first came into view of Chris’s work, I was it was first with camera, light has rendered imagery for profoundly struck by the duality of the body as made by time immemorial. A camera is a contemporary holder of multiple suns. I had been working with the singular sun light. I use a camera at times, as it enables me to hold and here was this artist who had filled the body with light as it were in my hands – to shape it. A final work hundreds of suns via a camera-less technique that for all might involve an image made using light and the camera intents and purposes was indexical. The indexical conduit of light. The digital mathematical rendition of potential of hundreds of suns as held by the body, a light is another medium again. Another system, another poetic radical act. I revisited philosophic theory, language. photographic theory, theology… but none marked that radical potential. I was moved to work with distant suns as well as our near one. It was a continuation of a long BD The figure appears as a wraith in your held desire to ‘fall’ into the universe. In his later work as work Chris, while it is absent in Simone’s… a painter I see bodies fall through space, a simultaneous call between sky, space, land/ desert, psyche.