Philomene Pirecki
c/o
Jamie Shovlin
a show part of the cycle c/o – an alternate correspondence curated by Marianne Derrien
c/o – an alternate correspondence is a cycle of four exhibitions each of them based on the correspondence between two artists through their affinities, their common reflections and their desires to ally or to confront their practices.
For the second appointment of c/o – an alternate correspondence, the English artist Jamie Shovlin (lives and works in Liverpool) has decided to invite the English artist Philomene Pirecki (lives and works in London). Dealing with the confrontation of the mediums, through aesthetic manifestations and political questions, Jamie Shovlin and Philomene Pirecki have developed a broad relationship of time, contact and history. The works are in correspondence for revealing the process of making and the act of showing: re-made / re-make. The presented works set their focus of interests on the possibilities to compress image, sources, time to interrogate the constitution of an image and its parrallele existence.
Jamie Shovlin “manipulates the ubiquitous modes of contemporary media in an exploration of how cultural and historical events come to be seen as factual and how witnesses become questionable sources of information”. He constantly questions this paradox: how yesterday relates to tomorrow. Shovlin’s previous projects and works are constantly a relevant balance between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. As a ”tireless counterfeiter”, he constructed extensive and seemingly real archives, which were then revealed to be elaborate fictions.
Shovlin’s recent work focuses on a selection of new pieces with series of drawings and painting, video installations and site specific wall pieces, in which the viability of analogue archiving in the digital age is questioned. The paintings and drawings use the methodology of screenprinting to construct and ultimately deconstruct imagery. Conceived with a printing process as a means of making pictures without directly using his hands, the paintings reveal the dissonance between layers in the painting/printing process.
Shovlin is interfering in the “perfect” realization of that process. The images are corrupted, overpainted, spraypainted, obscured. He creates a new surface as a kind of debased palimpsest of process. Shovlin’s works are constantly made with these narrative dimensions using the transfer of images from different sources. These distinctions in the idea of touch-in making, understanding and contextualizing the images and transferring their source are being laid down for the multiples derivations from the original object in his drawings – images of others artworks and detailed drawings of the hands of classical renaissance statues.
At the heart of these many levels between the subject, the source and the re-maker, Philomene Pirecki‘s work is concerned with “the perpetual movement of time and the multiple perceptions and registers of it“. In her Reflecting works – for this exhibition: a failed photogram, a damaged photogram, and an empty space on Pirecki’s studio wall, she creates a virtually infinite genealogy of photographs. She then rephotographs the Reflecting works before it leaves the studio to be exhibited.
This 2nd generation image is in turn photographed in situ before the end of the exhibition and becomes the next generation, which will be re-photographed in the artist’s studio on the occasion of another exhibition, producing a new version to show. By accumulating visual memories, each subsequent generation is a process of deletions, additions and substractions that the environment yokes on the image. Moving between originals and copies, often re-photographing her own work to generate new and different iterations within the studio and the exhibition space, Pirecki’s practice addresses notions of proximity; how images act as an analogue for memory, unpredictably accumulating, persisting, mutating or disappearing.
The “Image Persistence” series are photographs derived from paintings that Pirecki no longer owns that are photographed directly from their digital image on a computer screen, bringing something which is physically absent into closer proximity, albeit in a new material form.
As a field full of tension, Pirecki’s paintings, installations and photos underline their relation with space and context in revealing the physical and conceptual aspects of the artist’s process. The pieces appear within this traffic between technological, digital and handmade processes. In this double movement with blank surfaces and memories or offspring of her work, Pirecki’s mixed media mural works present the experimentations in this infinite genealogy of visual memories. It reveals the gap between image, time and words related to a potentially unfinished state of the work. Pirecki and Shovlin’s works propose an new archeology or an other destiny of images between past, present and future.
For any further information please contact:
gallery@unosunove.com