Tuesday, 15 November 2011

Kevin Newark




Kevin Newark

I first came across this photographer in a lecture. When i first saw these images I thought that they were galaxies or stars or maybe jelly fish. It was amazed when I found out that they were plastic bags. I like these images as they show something so simple and lonely as a plastic bag can look like something as complex as a whole galaxy if you do not know what it is.

Kevin Newark. Protoplasm, 2006

Kevin Newark. Protoplasm, 2006

Kevin Newark. Protoplasm, 2006

Kevin Newark. Protoplasm, 2006

Kevin Newark. Protoplasm, 2006

Kevin Newark. Protoplasm, 2006

Kevin Newark. Protoplasm, 2006
"My practice resonates around the themes of space, time, anxiety and displacement. In photographing discarded plastic carrier bags found in the canals of East London, I looked to find some solace for the exiled soul of the plastic bag. After short, useful lives, discarded plastic bags enter into a perpetual state of retirement, their spent utility a metaphor for our own mortal anxiety, whereas the demise of plastic is a distant, uncertain prospect. The moment of disclosure (cognition) is delayed to induce a sense of disorientation allowing the viewer to disassociate themselves from the dogma of optical faith.

Their boundaries of scale can be breached in our allegorical thoughts allowing these photographs to be equally expandable or retractable; the electromagnetic imaging of micro-science and the radio imagery of space are seemingly alike; the Petri dish and the cosmos. Weightlessness engenders a separation of lightly form that permits a new relationship with dimensions in space. Dissociation from the atmosphere allows these tormented, utilitarian forms the serenity of an embalmed, opaque nirvana where they feign organic structures yet remain veiled with a radiant toxicity.

Kevin newark has been commissioned by Pavilion to produce a new body of work for exhibition as part of the Pavilion Commissions Programme 2008. "-    http://www.pavilion.org.uk/gallery.php?gid=15

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