The Office of Revised Futures – 2019

Exhibition and residence at The Smallprint Company during for Format Festival, March 14th – 16th, 2019

The Office of Revised Futures

In 1857, Gustave Le Gray used a combination of separate negatives to print his celebrated series of seascapes. He was highly praised for his creativity, but even from then, to think a constructed image can supersede a direct photographic representation of the world has been the thorn in the side of the medium. It is perhaps this premise that lies at the heart of the office.

Responding to Format Festival’s theme of Forever//Now, I brought together five artists whose practices explore ideas around constructed photographic images, mainly through analogue collage. The idea behind ‘ The Office of Revised Futures’ was both an exhibition of existing work, but more importantly a residence, where the artists worked together to create a new collaborative piece; splicing, pasting and creating new revised futures. The artists in residence were Lewis Bush, Melinda Gibson, Hannah Hughes, Fernando Martin Godoy and Mark Murphy. Their practices cover a wide range of approaches to the constructed image, from appropriation through to performance and digital animation. For four days, the office was in residence at the Smallprint Co. in Derby, during the opening weekend of Format19, in March 2019.

The connecting thread between the artists working at the office is how constructed images can disrupt photography’s temporality by creating alternative narratives for the past, present and future. Each of the works images in the show is presented as a reality which is ‘complete’ and simultaneously fragmented. In this sense, the photographic collage belongs to an imagined dimension (rather than any identifiable time) and also has no object to refer to (it becomes a new object in itself).

One of the main features of this show was to allow the audience to meet and interact with the artists working in the office during the opening days of the Format festival. The ‘office’ had a communal table around which all artists and guests could discuss their thoughts and produce new work. Additionally, we presented a selection of existing works evidencing the multiple references and associations between the different artists. The premise of the curation was to work with artists who question and challenge the machinations of photography, but are not photographers in the strict definition of the term, as they don’t shoot their own images.

Lewis Bush’s ‘War Primer 3′ is a reworking of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s War Primer 2, itself a reworking of Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel. Hannah Hughes’ ‘Flatland’ takes its title from Edwin A. Abbott’s Victorian novella set in a two-dimensional realm, ‘Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions’. The collages reconfigure fragments of found printed source material, to create speculative new forms, situated somewhere between reproduced images and the physical world. Fernando Martin Godoy’s ‘Construction time again’ is a series about human intervention on the landscape with a mythical nuance, where we find some timeless constructions of unknown origin and use. Melinda Gibson’s worked with Brad Feuerhelm’s archive in ‘Miss Titus Becomes a Regular Army Mac’ and finally, Mark Murphy’s ‘Remains’ focuses on the basics of analogue collage, exploring how things are found and discarded, parts are removed and elements remain.

The aim of the office was not only to create dialogues between works, but also enable artists to work together. For the collaborative piece, the five artists reworked a series of books by British publisher CRB – Cafe Royal Books. Working over the opening days of the Festival, the artists deconstructed and reconfigured images using fragments of work by some of the UK’s best-known photographers. This work will also be posted online, as the ‘office’ was invited to broadcast live from Derby via the Instagram Feed of Photomonitor, one of the UK’s leading digital photography magazines.

After three days of intense work, the office produced a ‘revised’ zine, incorporating fragments from the work of each of the artists in the show. This publication evidences the interests of each of the artists around the idea of photography as a tool to visualise places and objects existing out of time.

 

The Office of Revised Futures
Exhibition and residence at The Smallprint Company, March 14th – 16th, 2019
for Format19 Forever//Now

Artists:

Lewis Bush 
Melinda Gibson 
Hannah Hughes 
Fernando Martin Godoy 
Mark Murphy 

IG – #officeofrevisedfutures

www.formatfestival.com/whats-on/the-office-of-revised-futures