Image Information: Picturing Ideas of Supermodernity


My work can be viewed from a post-industrial standpoint, where the commodity of information has replaced the commodity of the object in terms of value. I am aware of this idea in the creation of my images, especially in relation to my use of colour and abstract forms. My photographic images feature dramatic colour shifts and fluid and sudden slippage between knowable objects and more abstract terrains of data. Rosemary Laing is an artist who is also interested in what I see as post-industrial themes, especially in her series "Greenwork" (1995) and "Brownwork" (1996-1997).

Laing's image Arial wall (figure 1) shows the image of a forest, coloured a saturated green, which has been ruptured in the middle by a shift from the landscape to blurred lines of colour. In Laing's image the rupture between the materiality of the trees and the immateriality of the digitalised lines suggest a shift from the recognisable terrain to a more post-industrial vision of information. The meaning of the forest, and of the landscape is reduced to transmittable data. In her essay on Laing's work, Annemarie Jonson says,

"the stability and density of terrain is exploded into its infinitesimal molecular constituents, the coloured particles which shimmer and coalesce momentarily into a picture field."8

Compare Laing's image with my own image Untitled 2004 - detail (figure 2) that shows a detail of greenery surrounded by blackness. My image, in the centre panel of the completed triptych Untitled 2, 2004 (figure 3) serves as a mediation between the intimate profile of a person and the subject of their longing gaze, a building. In my work this green panel serves as a locator of distance, in terms of how distance operates as mediation between location and desire. The blackness of this middle panel is connected to areas of blackness within the two other images, which connects the shift between the three images. The middle panel operates as a representation of space, the distance between places. All three panels are specific in their particular location, but yet transient in the psychological placement. They have a recognisable sense of place but operate together to form new narratives. Jonson describes Laing's work as having both the "precession of artifice that marks the ineluctable loss of the real" and "an ineffaceable reference; now ruptured by the fast-time perceptual displacements generated by the transmissional gadgets of modernity."9 I feel this duality is present in both our works. I am, however, more concerned with the rupture of these specific locations as being specific to the experience of non-places and distance, than by the transmission and speed of objects and information.

In Laing's "Brownwork" series she explores the landscape of the airport through its physicality (architecture, airplanes, runways, storage facilities), and its relation to technology and speed (data, transmission, take-off). In her image Brownwork #9 (figure 4) we see the cavern of an aeroplane, stripped down to its functioning parts, looming in its emptiness, with the figure of a woman suspended from a rope in the middle of this emptiness. I am interested in how her work talks about the differences between the giant structure of the aeroplane and its role in the function of the airport, and the actions of the individual in this space. Blair French writes in his essay on Laing's Brownwork series,

"The airport is a re-configured landscape, a functional space for the massive orchestration of continuous material and informational flow and transaction."10

Laing's work is concerned with the functionality of the airport, how it is a facility of transmission and trajectory, but she opposes these ideas with the insertion of human figures, juxtaposing the non-place of the airport with the individuality of people. She compares the speed and emptiness of the airport's physical elements, with the actions of human bodies, and the relationship between human endeavour and technological pursuit. My work differs from Laing's work because I am interested in non-place, not as a space in itself, but how it affects our experience of place and our formation of memory.



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[8] Annemarie Jonson, Greenwork: Rosemary Laing, exhibition catalogue: Annandale Galleries, 1995, 2.
[9] Jonson, Greenwork: Rosemary Laing, 1.
[10] Blair French, Brownwork: Rosemary Laing, exhibition catalogue, Annandale Galleries, 1998.