postcards from innsbruck

Datum: 31.07.2002

autorIn:Cian Quayle
++++++++++

Whilst waiting for the arrival of a new passport for my visit to Austria, I started to wonder what I would see...

Postcards from Innsbruck

Whilst waiting for the arrival of a new passport for my visit to Austria, I started to wonder what I would see when I arrived. During this static time, I bought some panniers for my bicycle, in order to be mobile during the course of my short stay. I had already decided to bring several different cameras to record my journey around Innsbruck. At the same time I received postcards from the curator and other images via e-mail as part of our preparatory communications for the exhibition. I began to work with these images for the gallery web-site to provide clues to the finished work. It is the dialectical relationship via images (postcards) of how we see places from a distance, in contrast to the proximity of the actual experience of a place itself, which provides the basis for the photographic images I show in 'Techniken des Vorueberziehens'.

Cian Quayle London July 2002

________________________________________________

In Sea-mine (outland)

In Sea-mine (outland) a dematerialisation and deterritorialisation of an object situated in the landscape has been achieved, via computer manipulation, becoming a kind of photographic-ready-made. An optical blurring or shimmering of the surface causes a disorientating, illusion of space, where the eye struggles to focus the image. As distance and proximity are key issues in my work a visual range and privileged viewing range are at play for the viewer.

In the act of photographing seemingly insignificant objects, as spatial indicators, they also become punctuation points along a journey. However as Walter Benjamin described Atget's Paris photographs, the search for subject matter passes over the expected and instead seeks to develop a new typology of features of the unobserved. They embody what Thomas Crow describes as the, 'construction of the visual language of now takes on the used-up vestiges of leisure time, landscape, architecture and the impoverishment of these areas at the end of the twentieth century, as the elements of a new visual language for the next century.' At the same time they recall what Bourdieu describes as 'monuments to leisure'. Characteristic of the tourist snapshot are centring and frontality in contrast to the postcard image where a point of view is assumed, which historically takes its cue from Renaissance perspective. The features under scrutiny are often incidentally incorporated within postcard views. The sea-mine, unremarkable perhaps and not usually the focus of the postcard photographer, have become ritualised as alternative monuments.

Files:
Artist Bio
Postcard 1
Postcard 2
Postcard 3
Sea_mine_outland