Optic Nerve
Colour Abstract Photography
5 April - 8 June 2003
Wolsey Art Gallery

Featuring work by Richard Caldicott, Robert Davies, Garry Fabian Miller, Daro Montag, Roderick Packe and Neil Reddy.

Optic Nerve brought together for the first time the work of six artists who share an experimental and unconventional approach to photography. Often working without cameras, lenses, film or even light, they all produce luminous, colour-saturated images that question traditional ideas about what a photograph is and how it can be made.

Rather than capturing a single 'decisive moment', they create images that record the transitory passage of time, tracing and superimposing the optical effects of improvised but highly controlled processes to reveal new visual spaces and seductive tonalities.

Their work has a simplicity and visual intensity that is both contemplative and challenging and suggests many possible connections to modernist painting and visionary cinema.

Daro Montag's images are made using film to directly record organic processes – for instance by burying film or placing organic material onto its surface to produce what he calls 'bioglyphs'. The resulting images are thus tracings of biological processes, micro-organisms attacking the film's emulsion or insects meandering over plates of glass, for example, rather than traces of light. In what Montag calls "composition by decomposition" he uses the energy of decay to make visible and 'fix' the complexity of microscopic events. In these images entropy is documented in such a way that the patina of deterioration and decay, actually present on the film, emerges from it like a secreted painting when they are exposed to light.

To make images like those shown in the Optic Nerve exhibition, Neil Reddy shines coloured light through configurations of holes in metal foil in a specially made light box and during long exposures, adjusting the focus of the lens and the angle of the camera, he directs, manipulates, stretches and distorts the 'photographic moment', creating what has been called "a light show in miniature which only the camera witnesses". The resulting photographs constitute afterimages of light itself that are sometimes reminiscent of the patterns of 'closed-eye vision' that can be generated by closing ones eyes after looking into bright light or pressing on closed eyelids to create phosphene patterns of internal light that dance in the head.

Although using different methods to Reddy, photographing light itself is also central to the working process of Roderick Packe, whose intensely coloured prints are created by condensing elapsing time and movement into a single image, superimposing carefully choreographed tracking shots into a single frame to make what he has called still movies rather than film stills. The lush, polymorphous manifestations of flowing colour that result can be reminiscent of many natural phenomena of light – dawns, sunsets, the aurora borealis, luminous mists, glimpses of clarity through a hazy blur – bringing to mind the painter J.M.W. Turner's suggestion, speaking of his late landscape paintings in which gaseous colours fade into one another, that "vagueness is my forte".

Garry Fabian Miller, working without a camera, exposes light directly or through complex systems of refraction onto photographic paper. The particular character of each of his different series of work is the often fragile organic substance of the materials – leaves, oil, or water, for instance – through which the light passes. Such direct exposure techniques have a pre-mechanical quality that revisits the earliest tentative developments in photography as well as connecting with the deceptively simple processes exploited by some of the experimental filmmakers referred to earlier. Stan Brakhage's Mothlight, for example, is an abstract film made using the effect of light on and refracted through the diaphanous wings of a dead moth and a few flower petals.

Another of Brakhage's films, The Text of Light, a feature-length work composed of refractions in a crystal ashtray, brings to mind in its intensely focussed and single-minded attention to the infinite visual potentialities of mundane objects the working method of Richard Caldicott. The translucent forms and colour saturated veils in his work are created by recording the effect of light shining through nothing but plastic Tupperware containers against coloured backgrounds, sometimes emphasising the resultant transubstantiation of the objects by superimposing several transparencies. Both the triviality of the everyday objects and the simplicity of the process are transcended in shimmering images that unite the quotidian with the sublime.

Caldicott uses material objects and is in one sense the only artist in this group whose work consists of recognisable images of those objects, however much they are concealed or transformed. Robert Davies is, in a different sense, the only artist here who actually makes objects. His process begins by using optical-chemical methods to systematically mix the colours cyan, magenta and yellow in the darkroom, using filters and an enlarger to produce an almost endless sequence of coloured strips which are transposed into a graduating numerical system. These are used in different combinations to create images consisting of three or four subtly juxtaposed vertical fields of colour which are then encased in 'blocks' of thick acrylic, sometimes bevelled to create a prismatic effect, transforming them into photographic 'objects' that elide the boundaries of photography, painting and sculpture.

The inter-relationship of photography, painting and film and the crucial role of light as the subject as well as the means of production of photographic images were important themes in the connection between the six artists brought together in the exhibition Optic Nerve. In ways that variously observe, investigate and exploit the fundamentals of the photographic process, they each produce images that test the boundaries and celebrate the possibilities of the photo-mechanical recording of light and its movement over time. These artists are concerned with autonomous and reflexive approaches to exploring and amplifying the inherent properties of the photograph itself. Conventional notions of the indexical and documentary qualities of the photograph were necessarily challenged here, as were the conventions of how a photograph is made: for example some of these images are made without a camera, some without film, and in one case partly without light.

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