Stillness/Silence/Arrangements
Stillness/Silence/Arrangements
We are presented with two seemingly different exhibitions. Each opens up its world to be entered into. Within the space of Wall5, each exhibition enters into a dialogue with the other and with the viewer. To enter into a dialogue is to be “transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.¹
Each exhibition grounds itself in traditions, which are the staples of photographic history and practice. One exhibition presents the landscape, the other still-life. Such terms seem almost archaic and each exhibition builds itself out of such archaic notions, both signaling their own remaindering and yet vitality.
The work of Jed Hoyland presents a series of photographs of objects arranged and found on a mantelpiece in a domestic space, a home. The domestic space; the still-life, brings to mind countless works that have gone before. Objects reappear, taking on different qualities and relationships, actors on a silent stage, yet each remains a silent self-possessed character. The photographs seem to be silent, to withhold. The objects wait. The objects waited to be photographed and now wait again. Time has paused.
The work of Katja Hock continues the theme of Silence/Stillness/Arrangements. Walking through woodlands, returning to already photographed scenes, the photographs allow the viewer to linger, remain, and spend time creating a relationship between the photographs and their own imagination. The eye wanders between the scenes, acknowledging the reappearance of shapes, but they are slightly different than when seen before, reminding of time passed. It is the moments in-between, those voids between perceived time which cannot be shown that form and change memories and constitute the reading of the images. “For the important thing for the remembering author” as Benjamin remarks, “is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting?²”
¹ Gadamer, H G, Truth and Method, Sheed and Ward London, 1975, p.379.
² Benjamin, W, The Image of Proust in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt, Fontana Press, London, 1992, pp.197-210, p198.
