Electro Studios Project Space
26 – 30 October 2022
5 Seaside Rd, Saint Leonards-on-sea, TN38 0AL
Open 11-5pm Daily
PV Friday 28 October 6 – 8pm – All welcome
A chance to see work from the artist’s recent retrospective show and book of the same name – Tim E White – Fine art Photography 2002-2022. It will include previously unseen work and images from new projects/series
‘Sea is mystery, a vast area of unexplored, uncharted territory where the true nature of our planet is exposed’.
From the minimal sea sky horizons of ‘Precession’ and ‘Nutation’, to the explosive breaking waves of ‘Luna’, the sea, has been primary inspiration and subject matter for my fine art photographic practice, which I describe as anti-pareidolian – where pareidolia is the search for the recognisable in nature, I am much more drawn to abstraction and minimalism.
‘By its very nature photography involves abstraction, or the reduction of human vision to a two-dimensional representation’.
I want to confront the viewer with an image of profound dimension whilst simultaneously drawing attention to the flat photographic surface. A strategy that perhaps examines the act of image making itself and the somewhat paradoxical relationship between real and pictorial space. This flattening of the pictorial space, places us in what Gaston Bachelard termed ‘intimate immensity’ where the space of the personal and the universal blend. The images are prevented from drifting into pure abstraction by the traces of waves, clouds, and land that emerge like brushstrokes on the picture plane. Perhaps questioning where does the precision of photography end and the creativity of painting begin?
My more recent ‘Saccadic Light’ series explores similar themes but shifts focus slightly to the transition between land and sea. Inspired by the rapid or ‘saccadic’ movement of the eye between two points of visual interest within a landscape. The unseen subliminal transition is blurred, abstract. The camera mirrors this sweeping of the visual field and an almost subconscious perception of light. ’In Dark Trees’ ventures deeper still into the more intimate space of the forest. Throughout, images aim to inspire and elevate the perception of the observer, evoking the sensation of being immersed in the landscape, with a boundlessness that references the notion of the sublime. This strategy of image making is inspired by a rich inheritance of reductive aesthetics from Friedrich and Turner to Rothko and Ritcher. Indeed Friedrich and Turner conveyed in a vision of sea and sky a ‘pictorial world without matter’ that would set us free from the pull of terrestrial gravity and immerse us in pure colour and light.
‘My aim is to explore the tangibility of light, space and even time within the photograph’
Image: © Tim White
Information: Tim White | Electro Studios Project Space
E-zine: Intimate Immensity – An exhibition by Tim White
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