The BA Honours Photomedia Level Two show features works by Redwana Akik, Laure Brooks, Laura Chalk, Melanie Cheer, Nicole Heron, Barbara Malarowska, Ozlem Mehmet and Helen Orth.

The exhibition shows a collection of works completed by the artists within the second year of their degree in Photomedia.
The group's first collaboration together has proven successful with each artist offering a unique style within the medium of photography and film. The exhibition covers a vast array of conceptual ideas including identity, time, dream, nature, childhood imagination and contemporary debates surrounding gender and the celebrity.

A dynamic show which will provoke thought within many.

Below are some statements from the artists themselves about their works;


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HELEN ORTH
The Mundane Image

The photographs explore how we as an audience look and perceive celebrities in contemporary culture.

Influenced by Ziauddin Sardar’s essay ‘The New Statesman Essay – Trapped in the human zoo.’ The essay explores how we gaze at human celebrities as we would zoo animals. Sardar explains his theories by likening animals in the zoo to human celebrities, suggesting they both belong in a different genus, active in a different habitat from Homo sapiens – existing in this world which is far and beyond the realm of the ordinary (maybe to an extent of further than reality).

‘But while we look down on animals, we look up to homo celebritus. Animals remind us of what we have been. Celebrities present us with the images of what we may become.’

I have looked to the Celebrity Big Brother programme from January 2007, where celebrities place themselves voluntarily in a real life human zoo, to be watched by the fixated public.

By re-creating still shots from the Big Brother programme using myself as the model, I am able to present a mundane image of watching celebrities do everyday activities. The audience is left to question the authenticity of the celebrity’s actions, by the presence of the camera. In the celebrity infested virtual zoo, both the observers and observed are caged. Both are products of a caged imagination where aspiration and actuality are limited to narrowly confined spaces that lead inevitably to madness.

The celebrities I have chosen are Danielle Lloyd, Jo O’Meara and Shilpa Shetty. By using myself as the model, I am reflecting upon the fact that we as a society look to celebrities for aspiration. Celebrity culture has replaced older human sources of inspiration such as oral history, epic poems and legendary myths. Through the images, I sustain the fact that celebrities are just the same as you and I, maybe slightly more like animals when considering these images.

In each image, I have incorporated something that could be either seen at a zoo or affiliated with the zoo. The image in the garden of Jo smoking I included a very green plant and covered her face slightly giving her no identity. Using the black jumper and the huddled pose, it almost is a good imitation of a gorilla. The next image is of shilpa eating a banana, the focal point being the banana and how it is being eaten similar to a monkey, starting upside down. The blurred background has connotations to the Big Brother House, reflecting how Shilpa may do in her own kitchen, whilst watching such a mundane action is almost surreal. The final image of Danielle sleeping consciously uses green and the teddy bear as a symbol of nature. Using such slight gestures of a connection toward nature and a virtual zoo creates a figurative series to be interpreted by the audience.

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NICOLE HERON
Escape, 2007

The initial aim for the staged photographs was to explore the interactions made between a young girl and a strange ghostly-imagined being. The ambiguity of the narrative has developed to include the concept of dream and the possibility of parallel worlds of fantasy. Reflecting upon personal experiences as a child has been key in producing the photographs, that may seem bizarre and often strange. Through staging the scenes, Escape explores the possibilities of staged photography to construct narratives and to create illusions of reality. The staging of the image allows for a performance of the photographers invisible imaginations into the zone of the photograph similar to a painter onto a canvas. The series Escape challenges the myth of photography to depict and fix the ‘real’, creating an illusion of reality to express inner worlds and thoughts externally to an audience.

Escape was initially influenced by the movies of Steven Spielberg. Through his child centred narratives, for example ET and Close Encounters, Spielberg is able to express his own childhood fantasies and conflicts into the characters of the movie. Spielberg presents his personal attitudes and private worlds into the domain of the public encouraging his adult audiences to reflect back upon their own memories of childhood and possibly to relight the sense of wonder and fascination to a life beyond the here and now.

Through depicting a sleeping child and her drawing of a figure alone in woodland, the audience is introduced to a scene that many can relate to within their memories of childhood. By displaying this image alone, the audience is encouraged to create a link with the other images within the series. Through presenting a familiar and yet intimate, image, the audience can “pass from imagining seeing to imagining being.” (Saunders: 1967: 42) The other images within the series take on the look of a dream. The images of Escape uses a similar atmosphere to that found in the scenes of Gregory Crewdson that appear surreal and lonely, feelings which are often experienced within the realm of dreaming. It is unclear whether the journey is a dream, fantasy, a sleep walk or perhaps an actual experience. Often it becomes difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, as imagination and dream imagery often appear the same within the ‘waking realm.’ Especially within lucid dreams and nightmares, in which the dreamer is subjected to the an overwhelming ‘sense of being.’ The girl gazes out of the photograph within a ‘crewdsonesque’ manner perhaps searching for resolution or as a wish to escape from the tensions of everyday life or perhaps she is aware of what awaits her on her journey. Within the sequence the wish for escape and freedom is contained within the appearance of the second figure and the space of the forest and the lack of adult presence.

The photographs within the Escape sequence concern themeselves with the Freudian term of  ‘uncanny’ used to express the feeling of strangeness whereby things can be disturbing and odd and yet at the same time familiar. (Bate: 2004: 6) Through the doubling of the young girl within the photograph an unsettling and quite troubling aesthetic is created, however the mood seems quite playful with illusions of the game of hide and seek. Within the sequence which first appears as a dream the representation is not to be seen as “the collapse of reality into a dream-world, but the emergence of a psychical reality imposed upon the real.” (Bate: 2004: 41) The seperated figures may symbolise the seperation or tensions of the psyche, the wish to be free and the need for security within childhood. Or the images may be seen to respond to child development psychologist Adam Phillips suggestion of dissilusionment in the process of growing up and the loss of appetite (Phillips: 1998: 8) The second figure may represent an imaginery friend, exploring the need for security or possibly the reognition of herself as an individual as described within the theory of Lacan as the third phase of the mirror stage  in which the child “realises that the reflection is an image, but that the image is its own and its different from the image of the other.” (Sarup: 1993: 8)

The notion of doubling was also touched upon within the research of Wendy McMurdo, in which she seamlessly composses a digital montage of doubling encounters within children. The scenorios seem impossible, yet through there allusive nature the viewer questions the truth from the fiction, whilst forming an enquiry into the recognition of the self within the development of personal identity distinct from life and the world surrounding.

The doubling game is followed by the girl asleep on the forest bed, this image perhaps adds to the ambigious nature of the sequence. This can be read in many ways perhaps in a surreal incident the girl travelled to this destination in her sleep, either sleep walking or within a dream realm, or perhaps it is a figment of her imagination played out in her mind as she is drawing. The photographs illustate the complexities of the imagination, both within what is percievced as the world of childhood and within the artistic explorations of the photographer to stage a narrative concieved within the mind.

The work aims to produce questions rather than answers, the photographs within the module tests the boundaries of photography and the manipulative qualities it allows to construct a reality of the imagination, for example the representation of an angel figure, ghost or a manifestation of unconscious psychological tension. The final series aims to prompt and negotiate many readings, without restricting the viewer to a single definite answer.

Bibliography:
Bate, D. (2004) Photography & Surrealism – Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Decent, London: I. B. Tauris.
Phillips, A. (1998) The Beast in The Nursery, London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Sarup, M. (1993) An Introductory guide to post Structuralism and Post Modernism, University of Georgia Press.
Saunders, A. (1967) Imagination all Compact, London: Methuen ands Co Ltd.

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OZLEM MEHMET
Lonely Theatre

Ask yourself “What is time?” It is not something that can be sensed or seen and it cannot be held, it just transpires. The day is one form of measurement used to determine time, everyday consists of daylight followed by night, our bodies have become accustomed to this routine, where we are productive during daylight hours and asleep at night, each day we wake to a new day. The time that we are awake, during the day, we can account for everything we consciously do, but the unknown of the unconscious from the conscious state is a very different experience. When you lay your head on your pillow and close your eyes, do you know what will happen? As you leave the waking world to enter another, does time stand still in the waking world or do the two worlds, exist as one?

The Lonely Theatre collection uses film and long exposures to capture the spatial relations of night and dreams; Lonely Theatre is an exploration of moments unknown to the conscious mind, revealing the mystery of the night. The dark empty space occupied where time does not remain, where the empty dark spaces are filled with aura of the unconscious mind performing only for the self. The images are not re-enacted depictions of the dreams but of the sleeper in a state of deep unconsciousness experiencing the dreams.

The visible empty spaces are not quite vacant but  filled with the essence of the dreams that are only visible to the sleeper;  the viewer is left to experience what can not be seen, but what can only be seen through the minds eye.

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Redwana Akik
Grandma, Dada

As a person ages the effects of time and their life experiences can be seen on them mentally and physically. Time has many ways of showing itself on an aged person like through the deterioration of the persons mind, the wrinkles on their skin or the grey hairs on their head.  For them everything that they have experienced in life is now but a memory, they can reflect on the past through what they can remember, through the images and videos that they took and even through the family that they gave life to.

“And when we write upon our diary’s last page, life will have been one great memory of when we once had been, which is then forgotten as we leave the stage.”           - Duane Michals

The person in the film is a geriatric Bangladeshi female who has recently come to England to visit her family. Her name is Rohima and she is estimated to be in her early 80’s. She has lived in Bangladesh all her life and has travelled abroad for the first time in her life to a foreign country. She is the head of four generations of her family that are living.

The installation explores the difference between moving and still images. The still image represents how photography captures singular moments in time, whereas the video captures the fluidity of movement within time and space.

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