Case Open is the exhibition selected from a national
open call by a team of curators of international standing.
Don't miss this stimulating and surprising response to the theme
of Evidence by the 7 prize winning artists working with
photography: Craig
Ames, Rob
Ball, Anthony
Carr, Julian
Claxton, Mike
Downing, Joe King and Rosie
Pedlow.
Craig Ames Back There
Back There is a probing autobiographical account of conflict
and the post-traumatic impact it can have on the individual. The
work explores the relationship between psychological triggers of
trauma and the immersive and often overwhelming memories and
flashbacks of such events.
Rob Ball Pacemakers
Inspired by his time working as a forensic photographer Rob Ball
is interested in the role science plays in life preservation. His
photographic study Pacemakers is an insightful series of
photographs that references photography's power and ability to
record, archive and, perhaps more interestingly, its capacity to
present us the opportunity to see the unseen. The work draws
attention to the fragility of human existence.
Anthony Carr Untitled, Barbican
Untitled, Barbican is the conclusion of a larger
collaborative project undertaken at the Barbican Centre, London.
Visitors to the Barbican Library were given the opportunity to take
part in a pseudo investigation by assuming the role of a police
detective sifting through a box of evidence photographs for unknown
crimes, making notes of hunches worth further consideration. The
box of photographs then became a visual diary of the processes of
participants. The photographs are intentionally blurred apart from
the areas highlighted by Carr's collaborators.
Julian Claxton UFO
Julian Claxton has been given unique access to the Psychic
Research Foundation's Archive and has selected a series of
photographs of UFOs that have been used to illustrate the links
between paranormal activity and the presence of EMR from mobile
phone masts.
Mike Downing Desense
Desense is from Mike Downing's on-going work that queries the
notion of news images as evidential and indexical 'real' documents
and their role in a modern Western culture of the digital. For a
period of one month beginning on 11 March 2011 Downing collated
images chosen to represent global news stories by the BBC
International News website. Each image was then averaged by
colour and equalised, with a caption supplied either by the file
name itself or a brief description of the imagery it pictured. The
several hundred images were then sorted into colour order and laid
out in a manner which mimics paint manufacturer brochures.
Joe King and Rosie Pedlow Strange
Lights
Joe King and Rosie Pedlow's film revisits the site of an alleged
UFO incident in Suffolk. On a winter's night in 1980, American
servicemen stationed at an RAF base in witnessed some unexplained
lights in Redlesham Forest. The incident has since become Britain's
most famous UFO mystery with rumours of conspiracies and cover-ups.
Made 30 years after this event Strange Lights searches for
similar inexplicable phenomena. It toys with the idea of an optical
unconscious' - a phrase Walter Benjamin used to describe that part
of the material world which remains hidden to us but which can be
revealed by photography.
Events as part of Case Open