On entering Lon's studio, which sits opposite the
Amsterdam Zoo, my gaze was first drawn to shelves of
domestic objects which were both familiar and
unfamiliar, every one blackened and transformed by
being dipped in molten wax. These forms registered
quotes from Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss on the
nature of photography, being akin to the process of
sculpture in that both art forms are a cast of a
form, both asserting an indexical trace of an
original form and both asserting by its presence the
absence of the original form. These domestic forms,
now made sculptural forms, had been arrested and
transformed by their submersion. They had become a
kind of photograph and intuitively I sensed the
correspondence between photograph and sculpture. The
work prompted questions as to what a
sculpture/photograph could or could not hold.
These sculptural pieces are part of a complex weave
of language and intension. There is a residue of the
romantic in the work, that feeling of intense
personal attachment which resists reduction, a
rebellious need to liberate forms from the tyranny of
the prosaic taxonomy that lists and categorises and
eventually dismisses the poetic… the work
collectively bespeaks Lon's poetic desire to lift
forms from their normative state of pragmatic
reduction to function. The photographic and the
sculptural process Lon applies to her work is both an
act of resistance and a provocation to the consuming
gaze. The strategy in her work both invites and
requires you to engage and relate to the world of her
work via the human channel of imaginative projection.
The work prompts the imagination into action, why
else would an artist cover forms in black wax? The
application of the wax both amplifies the otherness
of the object, pulling it out of the orbit of
domestic consumption and asserting the object as
form. This is an act of defiance to the consuming
gaze, only allowing access to potential meaning via
the poetic gaze, the gaze that relates to the world
as a reverie on the nature of phenomenon. Lon is a
phenomenological artist, she deals in phenomenon
(Bachelarde, 'The poetics of space'). Bachelarde
explains how the qualities of a space are more than
the sum of its parts, that the true life of spaces
resides in their poetic resonance, that spaces and
forms resonate with associations.
Looking at Lon's photographs there is also a knowing
referencing in photographs of arranged objects that
tangentially reference the Dutch still life
traditions and particularly Vermeer's interiors. What
is being mined here is the way attributes of an image
can exist in the memory and be recalled by minimal
levels of association with a real lightness of
touch.
There is also the desire to play with the associative
readings of landscape and the mischievous misreading
of scale which she exploits in her landscape images.
One image in particular suggested a vast sublime
vista, on closer examination was really made of
prosaic and small scale material. In this image I was
reminded of the British landscape painter
Gainsborough. He bemoaned the fact that he had of
financial necessity to paint boring patrons portraits
when his real artist need and intention was to lose
himself in the imaginative reconstruction of
landscape space. His landscapes were not direct
translations or impressions but were constructed
first as physical microcosms, from twigs and branches
gathered from walking the landscape and then arranged
and set in clay to form a miniature constructed
landscape. Positioned to catch the light and cast
shadows, these constructed scenes were a distillation
and imaginative reconstruction, a gathering of the
traces of experience of moving through a landscape
space condensed into an imaginative construct to act
as a poetic prompt to memory rather than
topographical description of a particular view. Lon
similarly has the desire to process experience rather
than simply record appearance. By
deconstructing and reconstructing experience
the work also engenders a process of understanding of
the synthetic nature of language as working not
solely through description but as a process of
evocation and association, language as equivalence.
Lon's photographs are elaborate constructions which
evoke and provoke associative readings, the images
are constructs rather than impressions.
There were also large format digital prints which are
so heavily pixelated that they can only be read as a
landscape image from a distance. Similar to Monet's
water lilies which collapse to a harmonic weave of
paint only Lon's monotone/monochrome digital prints
are more severe, there is no sensuality of matter, or
the consoling performative residue of touch, rather
the work is suspended between a reading as atomic
particles, the world reduced to a digital stream,
highly abstracted and containing the ghost of an
image of a sublime landscape space of mountains. Lon
explained that the original image was taken by her
parents in their youth, and seeing the original image
it became clear that there was a dialogue in the work
between then and now, between an analogue and a
digital age, between an analogue and a digital
language.
An analogue image is a physical and chemical trace.
There is in the analogue process the sense of a
succession of touches, the photons of light emanating
from the original subject at a precise point in time
focused by a lens like the eye and streamed onto a
light sensitive surface to be chemically held and
bound in the negative as a trace of that moment in
time. Transposed to a physical print, the print now
held a precise chemical as well as visual trace of a
moment in time, and the physical surface of the print
through the passage of time accreting its own history
becomes more than a simple indexical trace, it
carried the desire and intent from that time to this
amplifying the passage of time, being a trace and a
contact back to that moment of perception, a precious
point of contact but also a present reminder of the
irretrievable loss of that time. The very fabric of
the photograph carries traces of touches, is an
accretion of the passage of time.
In contrast the digital photograph is an abstracted
image, the links of touch are broken, the patterns of
light are interpolated and translated to a digitised
stream of code which is then printed to pixelated
squares. The digital process defies rather than fixes
a time, suspended, stored as code it becomes an image
in stasis defying accretion. Lon has amplified and
calls attention to this process. It is both a loss of
the original and a new thing which is created.
It is no accident that Lon is working with an image
from another time, a time when the sublime was
experienced as a confrontation with the physical
scale of nature. When light and touch were
synonymous, The transposition of the original
photograph is a record of that cultural difference
and perhaps of an irretrievable cultural innocence in
relation to the sublime. If the physical sublime
pertained to the infinite and in so doing amplifies
the sense of our own brevity of life and fragile
limitation one can now consider that the digital
image pertains to a different kind of sublime. Our
optical ability to focus is extremely limited
compared to the technological power we have created.
An electron microscope can visualise atomic and sub
atomic particles. Our telescopes can now visualise
stellar formations across immense spans of time and
space. We now have a mental picture of a universe
made of dark matter. This digital data now
constitutes our contemporary sense of scale and has
generated a digitally enhanced form of awe. It is
this digitised sense of scale which the contemporary
mind measures its existence against. It is this sense
of a digitised translation of scale which is made
present in Lon's digital translations of her parents
analogue prints. The original image has been
transposed to a digital matrix which amplifies the
polarities of the macro and the micro, pointing to a
potential macro and micro infinity. Her
translations are not an homage to, or a sentimental
desire to retreat to a previous past but an assertion
of the distance between her parents analogue and our
digital perceptions, between their cultural and
metaphysical sense of the sublime and our emergent
technologically enhanced sense of the sublime.
Perhaps theirs was a more innocent relationship.
Our sense of the sublime is bound to
technology, we live in complex symbiosis, mediating
the world digitally, suspended between spheres
of language which both reveal and obscure the world,
irrevocably mediating our experience both from a
phenomenological and cultural perspective. Yet the
poetic instinct remains a constant, the desire to
register the perrenial fact that as human we need to
mediate the world above all else via our imaginative
abilities, that is the world mediated by the inner
life of the imagination which is both an emotional
and intellectual necessity.
London, September 2010