www.bpb.org.uk
4th Oct 2008
Reconciliation
Jason Evans
www.jasonevans.info
The Permanent Gallery
20 Bedford Place
Brighton
BN1 2PT
UK
www.permanentgallery.com
In this new show created specifically for Permanent Gallery, Jason Evans debuts his ongoing Reconciliation project. In this series of outputs he revisits his own diverse back-catalogue and the recurring themes of his practice.
For the Brighton Photo Fringe exhibit, the theme of Street Photography is his focus, and he presents new selections from 4 quite different bodies of work from the last 8 years in order to facilitate speculation about the nature of the discipline.
Where is 'the street'? Where is chance in the 21st Century? Is 'the street' a state of mind ? Have we come to the end of the road?
Also on display are objects collected on location whilst these works were made, as is an especially commissioned limited edition Reconciliation Scarf, made with long-time collaborator Alex Rich. The Gallery has also been re-decorated to bring its location into the equation and interrupt the institution of 'the white cube'.
A small publication designed by Alex Rich and Jason Evans accompanies the show.
The 4 bodies of street-work are :
The New Scent 2000-05
Black and White analogue photographs made with misleading visual imperative in mind. www.thenewscent.com
The Daily Nice 2004-ongoing
Colour digital captures from the web-based project www.thedailynice.com where a positive agenda is brought to 'the everyday'.
NewYorkLondonParisTokyo 2005-07
Black and White, analogue, multiple-exposure photographs, which relocate the decisive moment onto the film plane, inviting chance to combine scenes influenced by the visual precedents of these 4 major sites of street photographic history.
The End of the World is Fine 2000-ongoing
Black and White and Colour still lives and documentary style pictures. Scenes of personal wonder recorded for posterity with considerable pathos, juxtaposed with studies of pieces of things that used to be something else.
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Bighton Photo Biennial is the UK’s leading festival of photography offering an ambitious celebration of international photographic practice.
The Biennial is committed to stimulating debate on photography in all its forms: new and historic, digital and analogue, still and moving. The Biennial presents the work of international artists, from a range of cultural backgrounds, commissioning new work, premiering recent work and exhibiting historical work in new contexts.
The Biennial includes exhibitions, participatory programmes, publications, conferences, talks, portfolio reviews and outdoor events. An extensive education programme develops local audiences through which the Biennial aims to reach the widest possible audiences and creates exciting opportunities for participation and engagement.
Entitled Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War, Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 will explore photographic images of war, their making, use and circulation, and their currency in contemporary society.
The provocative writer and critic Julian Stallabrass will curate ten exhibitions presenting photography, film and online material produced and circulated in time of war, and analyse how images have been shaped by the changing social and political conditions from the Vietnam era to the present. The exhibitions will include images produced by photojournalists, artists and non-professionals.
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Julian Stallabrass on Brighton Photo Biennial 2008
The title is borrowed from Eduardo Galeano’s extraordinary book, Memory of Fire, an epic literary account of 500 years of Latin American resistance to imperialism. The book consists of numerous self-contained episodes which can be read in isolation but also combine with their neighbours to produce a larger picture of the book’s subject. Similarly, BPB 2008, which covers a long stretch of the South East England coastline, comprises many exhibitions and events, each of which stands alone, but which may be enriched when other elements are seen.
Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War takes on various issues as its main themes: first, it examines the production and dissemination of images in time of war, especially the changing conditions from the Vietnam era to the present. Images made by photojournalists, both as prints and as published in magazines and newspapers, are shown alongside presentations of online image displays, either on screen or made into wall-bound objects.
Memory of Fire will also illumine through an examination of the media the conditions of conflict, imperialism and expropriation, historically and into the present. By taking in views of the different sides of the various conflicts, radically different perspectives will emerge.
Memory of Fire seeks to frame and inform new imagery with old, and vice versa. In looking at historical imagery alongside the photography of current wars, the Biennial elicits intimations of the collective and individual memory of such images, their forgetting and revision, and their rebirth at times of crisis and war.
Finally, the Biennial looks at the place of the art world in the production of images of conflict, particularly the making of large-scale images of destruction on the scale of the history paintings of old (and like them sometimes commissioned by the state).
www.flickr.com/photos/brightonphotobiennial
photos © Julia Waugh.
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