Maurice Blanchot wrote that the act of translating is not about making the difference disappear, rather it is about revelling in it.
Green On Red is proud to submit 'Suspended Particles' for Art SG 2024. Bringing together three artists who, in their unique approaches, and through various forms of expression, pose a profound challenge to the conventional understanding of artistic mediums, revelling in their differences, and blurring the boundaries that once defined them.
Aoife Shanahan’s work is driven by a scientific interest in camera-less photography. She creates unique images, often utilising labour-intensive techniques stemming from the 19th-century origins of photography. Her experimental approach towards traditional analogue materials allows her to explore their expressive possibilities and to question their contemporary relevance in a digital era. Her project 'BioTrace', translates the unseen presence of bacteria into striking photographic images. Initiated during the COVID-19 Pandemic, she exposed photographic film to bacteria, which feed on the particles of the film’s silver Gelatin emulsion, thus destabilizing it. The resulting negatives are scanned and printed creating mesmerising abstract vistas, caught between photography, sculpture and painting.
Also exploiting the area between painting and photography is Mark Joyce, who will produce a bespoke wall painting in the booth, along with a series of works on canvas. Joyce creates loose yet wonderfully balanced works in response to scientific and optical theory. Astutely aware of the materiality of the medium, where particles of colour swim suspended in pigment, Joyce works with representations of light; both physical and theoretical. As part of his working process, he translates tangible observed reality into a form of abstraction, where he attempts to grasp the phenomenological strangeness of our optical experience.
The use of AI as a mode of translation is at the heart of Alan Butler's 'Deskscape' series. Butler’s heavily researched works draw from a complex web of cultural and contemporary histories, revealing depths between unseen layers. His 'Deskscape' series consists of large, laboriously hand-produced painted works. Oscillating between photography and painting, with 100s of hours of meticulous labour, the psychedelic abstractions are often mistaken for machine-fabricated, printed images. Butler’s 'Virtual botany' cyanotypes take their cue from 19th-century camera-less photography flora studies. The images document plant life that inhabits video games and VR environments. This virtual vegetation is then exposed through real sunlight onto photosensitive paper prepared using the original 19th-century cyan-blue photographic process.
Alan Magee
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