What's on

Chris Dawes - Skinscape

Recently my daughter Eloise saw a particular image on a heap of contact sheets and asked why I had never printed it. The embarrassing fact is that most of my black and white personal work remains on negative and contact sheet, and it often needs a fresh eye to pick out what appeals or has relevance in the shifting aesthetic and social diktat of the modern world. Which is why she has curative over-view of the show.

 Many of the larger abstract pieces, the colour work, erotic portraits etc, have been photographed in the last year, but I have included other images from the mid seventies onwards, that might induce humour or erotic resonance in the viewer’s mind.  

Here the apparent reality of a photograph is not so much a record of the time it was taken, but rather the essence of the photographer's choice of moment, framing, exposure, and ultimately printing. (Third party analysis of a process that is for me largely instinctive).

 We live in prurient and political times, in large part due to the ubiquitous mobile phone and the extraordinary quality of colour and rendition that even the most useless operative can achieve with their camera attachment. The social and political consequences of this are too far-reaching for this rambling monologue and in these morally chastened times the term 'erotic' is challenge enough.

The artist has to offer something beyond mere replication and visual acuity. Art is a mental trigger, an ignition or recognition of something innate or implicit in the creative process. In the case of this exhibition it is the erotic, expressed and perceived through surface, skin, and light. It is the texture of memory and figurative abstraction, erotic portraits and illusory snaps.

A palimpsest of imaginings.

A skinscape.