TIMESLIP
Proposal for Curatorial Project, Fringe Arts Bath
GEOFF DUNLOP Artist
The Old Drugstore
4 High Street
Axbridge
Somerset BS26 4AF
0777 555 7725 / 01934 733440
[email protected]
www.geoffdunlop-artworks.com
An exhibition featuring camera artists who explore
the mysteries and paradoxes of time.
Proposal
By definition, any art that involves the use of a camera is an
encounter with time. In the early days of photography, time was
coagulated by the slow exposure of chemicals to light. The
subsequent development of camera-based media chopped time into
unimaginably thin slices, enabling us to see the previously
unseeable. And as the digital revolution further redefines what
camera art is today, and how it might progress, time has once more
become an area of intense exploration - and of play. Much
contemporary work makes time seem elusive, layered,
multidimensional, even dreamlike, as if acknowledging a realization
that time itself has become a category of experience that has lost
its bearings. Some people -physicists and philosophers among them -
even suggest that time is a condition not of reality but of our
imagination.
The proposed exhibition, TIMESLIP, would present work that
reflects this current fascination of camera artists with time. It
would show a range of approaches, from the scientific and precisely
observed to the subjective and
highly constructed. A rich vocabulary of technical resources and
“errors” is brought into play by artists now. They employ blur,
shake, multiple-exposure, layering, compositing, distortion,
complex colour, monochrome, texture, grain, focus and defocus,
setting, costume, performance and photography’s own overwhelming
archive of images from its past. These techniques produce work that
challenges, confuses and complexifies the very notion of now or
then, the contemporary or the historic. Artists today can create a
meta-time that evokes and extends the experiments of Cameron,
Muybridge, Melies, while embracing a freedom that has been enjoyed
by painters since the era of the cave.
If this proposal is accepted, I would extend an open invitation
to artists to offer their work for possible inclusion in this
exhibition, but I would also like to approach specific artists
directly, with an invitation to join in the pictorial
conversation.
I would also like to create a corner of the gallery space, where
examples (in standard-sized reproduction) are
gathered together to illustrate the wider context. This would
act as a visual information panel, helping the visitor to engage
with the exhibition’s theme. Text would be spare, but scattered
through the space would be quotations to provoke thought about time
itself. For example:
“I confess, I do not believe in time.”
Vladimir Nabokov
“We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of
humans, the subject experiencing subjective time is not a perfect,
structureless observer, but a complex, multilayered, multifaceted
psyche. Different levels of our consciousness may experience time
in quite different ways. “
Paul Davies About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I
wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Saint Augustine
The images shown here are purely illustrative. They do not
represent a commitment to particular artists.
Geoff Dunlop cv
For most of my creative life I have travelled the world as a
filmmaker, most often in the context of international broadcast. My
many films - exploring culture, politics and belief - have taken me
to over 60 countries, and they have been shown in many
more. But throughout my time as a filmmaker, I have been an
active photographer, writer and occasional broadcaster, with a
developed interest in the visual arts.
Today I am concentrating my attention on the image, attempting
to liberate it from the tyranny of the narrative – just as a poet
might attempt to liberate the word. Yet I find that the imperatives
of stillness and movement, time and space, beginnings, middles and
ends can never really be ignored, only reconsidered in a new
setting. As well as making my own artwork I have made films
featuring visual artists as diverse as Rembrandt and Jean Michel
Basquiat, Giotto and Joseph Beuys, Michael Nelson Tjakamarra and
Anselm Kiefer. History, politics and ideas run as continuous
strands through my work but so too do the sensuous and
emotional.
Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include:
Creekside Open, APT Gallery Deptford, London - TM13, Real
Fonderia Gallery, Palermo, Sicily - Lyme Open 2013, Malthouse
Gallery, Town Mill, Lyme Regis, Dorset (Prizewinner) - SCOPE,
Miami, Florida - PhotoPlace Gallery, Middleton, Vermont -
Colletiva 1, Garage Bonci, Pietrasanta, Tuscany, Italy - Immersive
video presentation for Cultural Olympiad, ICCI 360 degree Arena,
Olympic sailing venue, Weymouth, Dorset.
Film presentations and talks: ICA - National Gallery - Tate -
NFT - Modern Oxford - Ikon Birmingham - Orchard, Edinburgh and
others across UK - Metropolitan, Whitney and Broadcasting Museums,
New York - Pompidou Centre, Paris - National Gallery, Sydney.
Although I have not worked as a sole curator I have worked
collaboratively with many curators, some of them prominent in the
field. Filmmaking is often a curatorial process and it is always a
demanding challenge to one’s organizational and logistical skills
and experience. I would be very happy to collaborate with another
curator.
