"The technical and industrial dispositions of photography are central to the medium. For the most part, however, these remain invisible. Photographs are usually understood as photographs of something else. In Andrew Wright’s Selected Diptychs and Multiples we find works that adopt different strategies for considering the technical and material nature of photography as such, while at the same time reflecting on and interrupting photography’s relationship to depiction. At one extreme photography appears as matter – a raw resource subject to certain procedures and effects with the potential for depicting something other than itself. At the other, photography investigates its disposition as a depictive process through extra-photographic means: the photographic depiction of another place and time is troubled by transformations to the operations and objecthood of the photographic image….
...Time is an element in photographic processes that photographers usually aim to control and limit according to precise technical operations. Here technical concerns have been dispensed with in favour of a consideration of the most elemental dimension of photography: the writing of light on sensitized materials. Flare is a series of cameraless images, a set of conceptual photo-objects revealing the effects of traces of light that have seeped through the edges of the hole Wright drilled through the box of film. The differences are minor but engaging: one can follow the path of light as it works its way through the sandwiched transparencies with varying degrees of success.
Photography’s multiplicity here is tied not to the reproducibility of the image, but rather to the industrial production and packaging of photographic supplies. Industry has adjusted to the ascension of digital photography by reducing and in many cases eliminating product lines. The film Wright used to produceFlare, Fuji Velvia 100, was prized by photographers for its highly saturated colours. Along with many ‘analogue’ film products, this film is no longer produced. While the minimalist-conceptual approach used here explores the properties and alters the uses of photographic materials, this series is also informed by the changing nature of the photographic industry…"
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Andrew Wright: Selected Diptychs & Multiples reception is July 12th, 8pm at the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, ON.
