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120 Days and Nights
of
STAGGERING + STAMMERING
The young man at the beginning of
Mirror stammers, and learns not to. My grandmother staggers out of The
China Hall, The Pimlico, The Eagle and never learns. In the icy wastes
of the French Alps she dives into freezing lakes followed by my
grandfather, without even a St. Bernard for company. The Troy Bar always
clings. However far I try and get away from Grey Gardens it still tugs
me back to Tea for Two. Our lives are smeared throughout the
world, recalled through disparate, dissolute, fragmentary images, sounds
and memories. 120 Days and Nights of STAGGERING + STAMMERING is
an installation that sucks in and spews out images of the people and
surroundings it encounters, real or imaginary, wherever it happens to
stumble.
Consisting of an old SLR film camera
and a LED spotlight each of the 120 ‘projectors’ will throw out images
of the people, events and the fabric surrounding wherever it is deemed
fit to be exhibited, in an ever changing, cavorting carousel, that
documents the transitory lives that pass through this crystalline world.
These images will be taken before and during installation and while the
installation is up and running. The audience will be invited to donate
their own images of the area showing their experiences in it and of it,
which then will be re-photographed and slotted into these projectors.
A dense flickering array of images
negotiated and dictated by the space, can be projected into, onto and
outwards of any given situation. They prefer shady aspects but can
flourish during daylight hours too. The larger less bright images are
made visible by the descending gloom of the night. The smaller, closer
to the wall/ceiling/floor, ones can cope with the intensity of other
light sources. The projectors can be clumped together in one location or
be spread around different locales as needs be.
The audience will be enveloped in and
disrupt this cacophony of images, creating and destroying as they wander
through and around them. Shadows will appear and obliterate the wall
images only to reappear on the bodies of the transgressors. The images
will be instantly recognisable as they will depict places just passed
through on the way to the exhibition site. There will be temporal shifts
occurring sometimes of mere days alongside others of an indeterminate
age. Referents will be lost and gained throughout this encounter.
The projectors are simple ‘plug and
play’ devices that are ready to go. Each one uses 1 Watt of electricity
and the LED light runs cool with a minimum of heat loss. They come in
‘groups’ of five or six each with its own lead and extension cable. They
are easily manoeuvrable and transportable. They come in their own cases
which then double up as steady platforms which give the projectors an
anchoring point.
Mark Ingham is visual
artist who has been making work about and researching into ideas of
autobiographical memory and its relationships with photographic images.
This work is made up of a number of installations that use SLR cameras
and a light source to create photographic projectors. They use
photographic slides as their image source and are attempts to create a
sense of memories being fuzzy narratives that can constantly change and
be changed. These projected photographic images are an exploration into
experiences of remembering and forgetting. They are attempts to evoke a
form of ‘paramnesia’, whereby fantasy and reality collapse to create a
sense of déjà vu.
Photographic images 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. Photographic images
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 installations are an attempt to
make manifest some of these ideas and illuminate further the
relationships between photographic images and the construction of our
autobiographical memories.
Mark Ingham has completed an AHRB
funded practice-led PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London. 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 is a visiting lecturer and a PhD Director of
Studies and Supervisor at Wimbledon School of Art. He is also a Lecturer
in the Architecture, and Design Department at The University of
Greenwich and a Sessional Lecturer at Ravensbourne College of
Communication and Design.
He has exhibited widely, most recently and
installation at Dilston Grove for Cafe Gallery Projects called ‘Ars
Magna Lucis et Umbrae’ which was funded by an individual grant
from the Arts Council of England. Also exhibited in a group show
organised by Curating Video entitled EPISODE at
temporarycontemporary, London which travelled to Leeds and Miami.Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae [The Great Art of Light and Darkness]
Dilston Grove [Cafe Gallery Projects] Southwark Park London SE16 2UA Wednesday 14 May - Sunday 15 June 2008
Launch Event Photographs
'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 this book and in it he described a projecting device, equipped with a focusing lens and a mirror, either flat or parabolic.
http://markingham.co.uk/Documents/2008_Mark_Ingham_E_Flyer.pdf
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 the enlarged colour images will be projected on to the walls of the Dilston Grove exhibition space in May - June 2008.
The main output for this exhibition will be the manufacture of about 100 of these modern day ‘magic lanterns’. They will be grouped in a series of narrative sequences and photographic tableaux that will be distributed unevenly throughout the cavernous space of the former church. Two types of images will be projected. The first type will be from the collection of images Mark has been using for the past few years in his work and which is based on his doctoral research whilst he was at Goldsmiths. These images will occupy the smaller rectangular space at the end of the church. The second type of image will use photographs taken over the next year of the inside and outside of Dilston Grove and the locale. These 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.
