PAST SHOWS: MARTIN EVERETT

11 JULY–16 AUGUST 2009

Martin’s photographic practise is concerned with the investigation of memory, duration and the inhabitance of the ‘on-going moment’. He combines image-making with lecturing and mentoring as well as research and written contributions to many of Europes’ art publications.

In regarding these images it appears at first as if the work invites confusion on several levels, and that ‘essence’ of meanings are generated in the process of de-coding - literally, ‘sorting things out’.

On the most obvious level, we always expect photographs to be pictures of something. We assume that the photographer observed a place, or an event or person in the world and wanted to point at it and record it. There is always something that motivated the taking of the photograph.

The challenge, could be argued, that these images are not really of anything in that sense; they register only an essence of what is incidental and peripherally implied. Instead there are some clues to indicate that what we are looking at is the surrounding information. Many of the compositions, whilst clearly deliberate and carefully arranged in relation to the picture’s edge, formally suggest a missing element (a loss of memory even).

Slowly it emerges that what we are being presented with is a sort of empty container, or vessel, and it is at this point that people begin to project identity into the space as it begins to read more than mere traces on an empty screen.