Press Release
ARS MAGNA LUCIS ET UMBRAE
MARK INGHAM
installation of light devices and projected images
100 modern day ‘magic lanterns’ grouped in a series of narrative sequences and photographic tableaux are
distributed unevenly throughout the cavernous space of the former church. Two types of images are projected.
The first type are from the collection of images that Mark Ingham has been using for the past few years in his
research. These images will occupy the smaller rectangular space at the end of the church. The second type of
image will use photographs taken over recent months of the inside and outside of Dilston Grove and its locale.
These latter images will create a site specific installation that will attempt to deconstruct the physical and
political dimensions of the space and will be sited in the main body of the building.
'The Great Art of Light and Darkness' is the title of a work on optics and the phases of the moon by Athanasius Kircher. Kircher was a
leading scholar in his time of natural sciences and mathematics. In 1646 he published the first edition of this book and in it he described
a projecting device, equipped with a focusing lens and a mirror, either flat or parabolic.
Kircher described the construction of this ‘magic lantern’ by writing:
"Make ... a wooden box and put on it a chimney, so that the smoke of the lamp in the box is on a level with the opening, and insert in
the opening a pipe or tube. The tube must contain a very good lens, but at the end of the tube...fasten the small glass plate, on which
is painted an image in transparent water colours. Then the light of the lamp, penetrating through the lens and through the image on the
glass (which is to be inserted... upside down) will throw an upright, enlarged coloured image on the white wall opposite.”
When Mark Ingham started to use SLR film cameras as projection devices he wrote: ‘In a blackened out room light from a torch shines
through a slide and on through the back of a backless old camera. A transparent, fleeting image captured by this same camera many
years ago projects outwards from it. A white wall intervenes, to reveal a glowing circle of dappled coloured light. The lens of the
camera/projector focuses the image.’
He sees his camera projectors as the direct descendant of those early ‘magic lanterns’, but instead of a wooden box and a lens he uses
an SLR film camera. Replacing the smoky lamp he has cool running Light Emitting Diode spotlights and the ‘transparent water colours’
are replaced by photographic transparencies. The transparency is still inserted upside down in the device and enlarged colour images
will be projected on to the walls of the Dilston Grove exhibition space in May-June 2008.
Venue:
Travel:
Exhibition:
Open:
Private View:
Dilston Grove, Southwark Park
Jubilee Line to Canada Water
May 14th – June 15th, 2008
Wed, Thur, Fri & Sun from 11 am – 5 pm
Saturday from 12 noon – 5 pm
Sunday 11th May 2008, from 1 – 4 pm.
Southwest of Southwark Park, London SE16 2UA. Tel:: +44 (0)20 7237 1230. www.cafegalleryprojects.org
c a f e g a l l e r y p r o j e c t s l o n d o n
CAFE GALLERY - Southeast London's leading artist-led venue for contemporary art
DILSTON GROVE - London's most important raw space for installation and site-specific art
DILSTON GROVE
Mark Ingham.
Press Release
‘Afterimages: Paramnesia’
Mark Ingham is visual artist and has been making work and researching into ideas of autobiographical memory and photographs for the last 5 years. ‘Afterimages: Paramnesia’ is the overall title of a project that will extend his work into the relationships between photographs and the construction of our autobiographical memories. The project is made up of a number of installations, each with their own individual title [i.e. Afterimages: Ships that pass], that use SLR cameras and a light source to create projection apparatuses that use transparencies from my grandfather’s collection of 5,000 photographs and are attempts to create a sense of memories being fuzzy narratives that can constantly change and be changed. This project will consist of approximately 30 camera slide projectors made by using LED light bulbs.
Image being projected through and SLR camera
When he started to use SLR cameras as projectors he wrote, ‘In a blackened out room light from a torch shines through a slide and on through the back of a backless old camera. A transparent, fleeting image captured by this same camera many years ago projects outwards from it. A white wall intervenes, to reveal a glowing circle of dappled coloured light. The lens of the camera/projector focuses the image. Caught in this fragile world a young boy somersaults and hovers forever above an icy cold swimming pool. Another camera clicks, another photograph is taken.’ He felt that a strange loop occurred whereby what once had been captured from the world was projected back into the world using the same apparatus, and then recaptured, light being the means of both its exposure and revelation.
These projected photographic images are an exploration into experiences of remembering and forgetting. There are attempts to evoke a form of ‘paramnesia’, whereby fantasy and reality collapse to create a sense of déjà vu. Roland Barthes says at the end of Camera Lucida,
‘The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand "it is not there," on the other "but it has indeed been"): a mad image, chafed by reality.’
A.E. Ingham and his son Stephen Ingham in the garden of 'Millington Road' c1940
Photographs are, like memories, a testament to our complex and elusive past. This idea that photography has altered our perception of the past, and even the perception of time itself, is central to this work. Photographs are seen as a living ghost of the past, here and not here at the same time, which creates a fundamental shift in the way the world is perceived and conceived. These camera projectors are an attempt to make manifest some of these ideas and will attempt to illuminate further ideas about the relationships between photographs and the construction of our autobiographical memories.
Mark Ingham is a Senior Lecturer in the Architecture, and Design Department at The University of Greenwich and is a visiting lecturer/4th Year co-ordinator on the Part Time BA (Hons) Fine Art course and is a PhD Supervisor at Wimbledon School of Art. He has just completed an AHRB funded research led PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London entitled, Afterimages: Photographs as an External Autobiographical Memory System and a Contemporary Art Practice. He studied BA Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art and Design and went to the Slade School of Fine Art for his postgraduate studies. He was then awarded the Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He studied for a PGCE in Art and Design at the Institute of Education, London and has been a visiting lecturer in numerous art colleges for 20 years and was an education officer at the Whitechapel Art Galleryfor four years. He has exhibited widely, most recently in EPISODE at temporarycontemporary, London, which will travel to Leeds and then to Miami in 2006. Also in the Fantastic! Exhibition held in the Crypt of St. Pancreas Church, in Folkestone in The Greatest Show on Earth and has shown a film PALAVER in Lille, France.
