City Centre Ruins – 2018

2018… (A cynical person’s view of the aftermath of 2017)

My entry to the Ferens Open Exhibition 2015. The title of the image is 2018, i.e. year after the city of culture. This photo reflects the views of the cynics and the haters. Hull as a post apocliptic waste land after all the glitz, glamour and money has gone…. Not that I think this will be the case at all.

The image is created with own images and 4 copy right free source images. By creating the landscape with real everyday images I think it creates a certain believable realise that drawings and paintings might not have.

Taking around 30 hours the images where placed and manpulated using photoshop and a LOT of groups and layers.

A2 Print

Within my photography I like to create surreal, odd, magical scenes with locations that people still recognise. My main drive for doing this comes from often I hearing that Hull is boring or uninspiring and dull and I guess within my work I’d like to prove the bored, uninspired haters wrong.

(And also I absolutely love creating my own manipulated realties).

 

 I think the themes of this work could both fit in with the everyday and also gothic.

Everyday = Using everyday images to create a work.

Gothic = Decay, dread, ruins melodrama & mistrust.

 

 

Contemporary Gothic Art

Louise Bourgeous 

Red Room (Parents) 1994

Red Room (Child) 1994

Dark, bloody red objects, body parts. Memories of a unhappy childhood. The space is frightening and unnerving it gives the viewer a sense of fear and dread.  It also reminds me of the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film The Shining.

Scene from The Shining 1980

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Charles Ray

Family Romance 1993

Family Romance consists of four sculptures of the Father, Mother, son and toddler daughter. The father figure who could be seen as the head of the family, top of the hierarchy list has been shrunk down to be the size of the children as well as the mother. A crisis of authority and power.

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David Altmejd 

Untitled (Blue Jay), 2004

Altmejd’s sculpture of a half rotting half eaten magical creature plays with the gothic themes of decay and schlock. And also it could be considered Anti God’s law in the enlightenment time due to the face that Altmejd has created this mythical beast and changed ‘gods’ natural order.

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Lnez Van Lamsweede

Lady Gaga

Again another fantasy creation linking to the theme of Frankenstein and monsters.

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Gregory Crewdson 

Untitled (The Father), 2007

Dramatic, theatrical, fantastical and staged. Like the Gothic themes of mistrust and melodrama Crewdson’s images are set up and false but also give a feeling of unease and nothing is quite what it seems.

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Rachel Whiteread 

House -1993

House – 1993

House was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house. This work fits perfectly with the Gothic themes of Decay and also the Gothic obsession with ruins new and old.

18th Century Gothic

The age of enlightenment started in Western Europe in the 18^th century. It was an intellectual movement focused on reason and science in philosophy and the study of human culture and the natural world. People at this time believed that knowledge leads to fulfillment and happiness and that religion was only superstition. Science requires proof therefore it can be believed unlike superstitious religion.

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768

Not everyone agreed with the age of enlightenment (or also known as the age of reason). Reason was about law, order and hierarchy. Philosophers Vico and Herder could see the problems, the rationalists needed the irrational to survive. After all you can’t have rational without irrational and so Gothic was born.

Gothic loved rebelling established authority, it was the opposite to the age of reason. Gothic focused on subjects such as power, decay, dread, anti God’s law, schlock, melodrama, mistrust and sado-masochism.

Decay 

In architecture a fascination for old ruins and new ruins made to look old. Then moral decay, bodily ruin and emotional ruin.  Ethical decay, today we have graffiti, terrorist bombings and ruins of shops and businesses failing.

Saturn Devouring His Son – Francisco de Goya y Lucientes 1821

 

Dread 

Dread was believed to encourage fear and therefore respect. The Gothic embraced autocracy. It thrived on monsters, vampires and the evil within. The opposite to what the age of reason wanted.

The Nightmare – Henry Fuseli – 1781

 

Anti God’s Law and Sado-masochism 

Fetishist decoration and mutilation of the natural order. Domination and submission, master and slave, superiority and inferiority.

We are Making a new World- Paul Nash 1918

Juliette a novel written by the Marquis de Sade. Published 1797

Schlock 

The gothic style perused schlock for its own distinct atmosphere, vocabulary and furniture.

Melodrama & Mistrust

Dramatic, theatrical, fantastical and staged.  Gothic yet again is everything that the Enlightenment age was trying to avoid.  Everything is false, nothing is real or what it seems to be.

Sleeping Venus – Paul Delvaux 1944