At Kings Head, Waitpinga, southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The background context is this online exhibition at Encounters Gallery.
Suzanne is away in Brisbane and I am minding the 2 standards poodles. So the poodlewalks are within contained areas. Hence the walk along the Heysen Trail to Kings Beach and Kings Head.
This picture is part of an ongoing series that builds up a body of work to provide a supplement to a forthcoming online exhibition at Encounters Gallery:
This picture is part of an ongoing series that depends on certain weather conditions along the littoral zone.
It was made on a poodlewalk during a a wild storm event. The tide was high, the wind was gusty and strong, and the waves were very high. It was quite dangerous making my way around the rocks west of Petrel Cove. We--Maleko and myself--- had to proceed with great caution.
I made a video of the surging waves using my iPhone 6 whilst on this afternoon walk. The waves swirled around my feet as I sat on a rock making the video.
On the recent poodlewalks (in late July) I have started exploring the local terrain for some new images for the forthcoming online Abstraction exhibition at Encounters Gallery in a couple of months. This is one possibility that I came across whilst walking along the coastal rocks near the lookout at Kings Beach Rd in Waitpinga.
It is very low key as I have been busy with getting the Walking/photography exhibition ready for the SALA Festival in South Australia and making few large format photos for the forthcoming Friends of Photography Group online exhibition in August.
This picture is part of an ongoing series from which emerges a forthcoming online abstraction exhibition at Encounters Gallery.
Made on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla along Depledge Rd in Waitpinga.
From this low-fi blog in a minor photographic key a proposed online abstraction exhibition at Encounters Gallery has emerged that explores the contemporary nature of abstraction as opposed to the art historical one that sees abstraction as an modernist style of the 20th century. It is seen as outmoded--a pure” form or aesthetic form(s) that transcends historical and social influence that ran out of steam in the 1970s. Abstraction is locked into an historical dead end.
This art historical account still remains the dominant interpretation of (painterly) abstraction and so it appears to be very odd to speak of abstraction and politics, abstraction and culture, abstraction and gender or abstraction and race.
What has emerged from the blog is a proposed online abstraction exhibition at Encounters Gallery.This exhibition on abstraction photography includes some of my photos as well as possibly those of two colleagues, namely Beverley Southcott and Adam Dutkiewicz. We have exhibited together before, and Adam and I have published a book with Moon Arrow Press on abstract photography in 2016.
This picture was made during the recent stormy weather that took place in early May. This particular abstraction refers back to this earlier foam abstract. Both of these are abstract in the sense of the image being removed from its context.
However, there is a context to this abstraction which removes itself from all context. The picture was made during during the Covid-19 lockdown. It is not often that there is foam amongst the coastal granite rocks. It is generally happens during a big storm, but the waves from the surging seas usually prevent access to most of the littoral zone. The foam doesn't hang around for that long either.
During the Covid-19 lockdown I have been photographing in my local area: mostly exploring and photographing within a few kilometres from our home in Encounter Bay. The photography has included both digital and film.
The emphasis has been on the film work--initially medium format, then large format--- so that I am able to participate in an online exhibition of film photography hosted by the Friends of Photography Group in Melbourne.This is an exhibition of film photos made during the lockdown.
Abstraction is usually seen as a removal, or a paring away.It is an abstraction from something, or stripping away the context. This is usually seen as a moving away from figuration and representation, and with Formalist modernism (Greenberg) also a moving away from other media (literature and narrative). The modernist desire/drive is for a purity of art forms expressed in terms of specificity of pure visuality and painterly form.
This repression of literature to achieve purity in the specific medium of painting through erecting a wall or grid (Ie., Rosalind Krauss) between the arts of vision and the arts of language collapses with the shift to post-mediums and the intermingling of media.
I am reading this text on Deleuze and abstraction by Brent Adkins as part of trying to understand how different people conceptualize abstraction. This is normally seen in terms of a removal, a paring away, a purification. It is an abstraction from something.
Deleuze has an idiosyncratic view of the abstract, which compared to that of Clement Greenberg or Peter Wolin or Hegel. Whereas Hegel (and people generally) think of the abstract in opposition to the concrete, Deleuze thinks of the abstract in opposition to the discrete. Deleuze views abstract art as being abstract because it produces sensations not representations. Sensations are defined as percepts (new ways of seeing or construing ) and affects (new ways of feeling).
Affects are associated with intensity (or the tendency towards change) and not extensivity (or the movement towards stasis). Abstract is one of the ways that Deleuze thinks through intensity. For Deleuze the abstract is true lived experience. Abstract lived experience is linked to the tendency toward change (the concrete) as opposed to the tendency toward stasis (the discrete).
In the art institution the new is structured in terms of a linear progress as a before and after. The temporal schema is a before abstraction and an after with the before--realism--- seen as negative and modernist abstraction seen as a new enlightened era. However, it is more accurate to see realism and abstraction as co-existing with different layers of strata that are full of dramatic breaks, ruptures in these layers; stopping points, rifts, shafts, with their multifarious interactions. Photography in creating something new can be seen as a bringing together of disparate elements or lines that cross cut its history without being confused with it or being stifled by its conformity.
The background and the context of this digital abstraction can be found in this post on the Encounter Studio photo blog. The image, which is another fragment in the abstraction series, delights in colour.
A digital image poses a problem: Is the digital work its file, encoded and encrypted and clearly mathematical, or is it a fulfilled, material expression of that file? Or is it both of these? The key is the integration of photography into the network milieu with the emergence of new practices for circulating and archiving everyday images (eg., on Flickr). The makes the photograph's condition one in which the image increasingly functions as a form of data regulated by statistical/algorithmical processes.