A visual symposium at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury during Nov 2012. Curated by Matthew de Pulford and Moyra Derby. Picture / Tableau / Screen are terms shared by film, photography, painting and other fine art practices. Four separate installations of work took place during November 2012 to consider the distinct but overlapping contexts they open up.
Picture / Tableau /Screen are terms shared by film, photography, painting and other fine art practices that engage with the pictorial. The visual symposium at UCA’s Herbert Read Gallery considers the distinct but overlapping contexts they might open up.
Picture / Tableau /Screen all imply the sense of something composed, ‘cut out’ distanced, staged and contained in order to be looked at. George Berkeley writing in 1732 asks us to imagine a ‘diaphanous plane erected near the eye and perpendicular to the horizon’, a theoretical proposition that delineates a pictorial version of vision. Proposed here as an articulation of ‘picture’ ‘tableau’ and ‘screen’, Berkeley’s plane can be said to both enable and stand in the way of visibility. An external projection that infers an internal counterpart, it shares with these three terms the presumption of a front; it is a plane that faces a viewer. Within the pictorial, the quality of facing activates an attitude of looking, a particular form of attention and reception, even if it is articulated through turning away or moving past.
The ongoing installation of work during the symposium aims to foreground the process of work becoming aligned to a viewer and a viewing space. Viewing is considered active, offering a form of participation within the restraints of the pictorial. This alignment is considered a dialogic moment between art object, environment and viewer at which point all three become active participants.
Participating artists were: Angus Sanders-Dunnachie, Derek Hampson, Jost Münster, Mick Finch, Joan Key & Anton Lukoszevieze, Beth Harland & John Gillet, Laura Lisbon, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Nicky Hamlyn, Bob Matthews, Philomene Pirecki, Ian Bottle, Kate Hawkins, Anthony Mott, and Pat O'Connor.
