SOMEWHERE OTHER THAN HERE...
Photographs made on a series of random bus journeys across the city of Plymouth during one wet day in September.
Photographs made on a series of random bus journeys across the city of Plymouth during one wet day in September.
The fluidity of somewhere other than here...
The sensation of diving into water and turning and turning back to look upwards to the surface invokes a mediated state of being. The window of vision is fugitive, solids dissolve into liquid and perception is channeled into moving colour, shape and distorted sound. A thin oscillating veil of water gently floats between visual dissolution and hard-edged reality, a state from which we could emerge or recede at any time. In this recent body of photographic work, artist Andy Klunder takes us into a mottled underworld littered with suggestions of barely discernible forms. We begin with a bus journey mapped through the urban grey drizzle of the city of Plymouth. Such a mobile cartography leaves a delicate visual trail which echoes this sense of immersive watery displacement.
As we travel along the speckled artery urban architectural forms melt and fall away in drops of condensation. His images slide us into altered states of visual clarity where we glide by streets through the limited lens of the bus window, toppling forms with sideways glances. Warm, smudged areas of fluorescent illumination magically seep through glass panes of fluid, muted greys. We are held within that moment, between the pulse of the flashing lights and the layers of condensation obscuring them. A watery membrane persists, glazing our perceptual reckoning and then we move on. This is a form of painterly dissolution in motion. Through the trails of water and mist we hover between states of emergence and disappearance. Blurred edges of figures, buildings and cars are revealed through cold lifted spaces of physical contact with glass. The mundane is at once at hand and visually transformed into a liquid sublime. Such a sublime might be seen as philosophically consistent with Jean Luc Nancy's interpretation which functions, as Phillip Shaw suggests: "as the movement that enables the mind to think freely without reference to determinate concepts."*
It is in this strange peripheral and hazy space that we freefall into the space of the imagination. Klunder constructs a wavering parallel, yet connected, universe in which we are made aware of and sense the fragility of our own states of being. We clutch tenuously at lucidity, at relative consciousness, trying to focus and refocus on soft ethereal forms just beyond our grasp. His work invokes an ontological collapse of sorts: a dreamscape that quietly suggests the conceptual fluidity of somewhere mutable, somewhere other worldly, the fluidity of somewhere other than here.
Dr.Karen Roulstone
*Shaw,P (2006) The Sublime, Routeledge, London and New York, p.150
The sensation of diving into water and turning and turning back to look upwards to the surface invokes a mediated state of being. The window of vision is fugitive, solids dissolve into liquid and perception is channeled into moving colour, shape and distorted sound. A thin oscillating veil of water gently floats between visual dissolution and hard-edged reality, a state from which we could emerge or recede at any time. In this recent body of photographic work, artist Andy Klunder takes us into a mottled underworld littered with suggestions of barely discernible forms. We begin with a bus journey mapped through the urban grey drizzle of the city of Plymouth. Such a mobile cartography leaves a delicate visual trail which echoes this sense of immersive watery displacement.
As we travel along the speckled artery urban architectural forms melt and fall away in drops of condensation. His images slide us into altered states of visual clarity where we glide by streets through the limited lens of the bus window, toppling forms with sideways glances. Warm, smudged areas of fluorescent illumination magically seep through glass panes of fluid, muted greys. We are held within that moment, between the pulse of the flashing lights and the layers of condensation obscuring them. A watery membrane persists, glazing our perceptual reckoning and then we move on. This is a form of painterly dissolution in motion. Through the trails of water and mist we hover between states of emergence and disappearance. Blurred edges of figures, buildings and cars are revealed through cold lifted spaces of physical contact with glass. The mundane is at once at hand and visually transformed into a liquid sublime. Such a sublime might be seen as philosophically consistent with Jean Luc Nancy's interpretation which functions, as Phillip Shaw suggests: "as the movement that enables the mind to think freely without reference to determinate concepts."*
It is in this strange peripheral and hazy space that we freefall into the space of the imagination. Klunder constructs a wavering parallel, yet connected, universe in which we are made aware of and sense the fragility of our own states of being. We clutch tenuously at lucidity, at relative consciousness, trying to focus and refocus on soft ethereal forms just beyond our grasp. His work invokes an ontological collapse of sorts: a dreamscape that quietly suggests the conceptual fluidity of somewhere mutable, somewhere other worldly, the fluidity of somewhere other than here.
Dr.Karen Roulstone
*Shaw,P (2006) The Sublime, Routeledge, London and New York, p.150