Duration Reveals Extension

Solo exhibition, August Art Gallery, London, 2008

For this exhibition a simple perspectival drawing of a gallery’s interior was made, then deconstructed. The drawings’ constituent parts were then re-presented in a sequence, white on black, on a large screen that was suspended across the same, darkened gallery space. The separated elements of the drawing were back-projected at actual size as a series of seemingly disjointed lines and angles. From this, it was intended that the space hidden behind the screen might gradually be perceived as the result of a viewer’s conscious retention of the drawings’ elements as they appear briefly in front of them.

This process of image construction / visualisation combined image memory and imagination in an extended perceptual process that was enhanced by the phenomena of the retinal afterimage. When witnessed in the darkened environment in front of the screen the brightly projected elements of the architectural drawing remained briefly in the eye as inverted ‘ghosts’ of lines and angles, accumulating and recombining fleetingly on the retina.

The original drawing was never presented in its complete form, only as a sequence of separate abstracted elements. The viewer’s sense of the space hidden behind the screen resulted from their combining both conscious and physical memory of these reduced elements and their ability to build a larger image from fleeting suggestions of form.