The Spectral Lens questions how aesthetic practices can represent (or interrogate) identity in an age of image flux and post-colonial review. Using strategies of ‘hauntology’ and the spectre, the artists consider contemporaneity as a site of complicit erasure and resurrection, where place is perceived as a complex habitation of ghosted pasts and presents.
These Hauntology’s exist from within the present, the past and the future and offer alternative timelines and voices to recompose dominant historical narratives through methodologies of trace, refraction, distortion and diffusion. These strategies are recomposed or mediated into new spectral entities of affect and resistance.
The artist’s conjure the invisible, inaudible, and illegible through textures, rhythms, atmospheres, invocations, gestures, vernaculars and affects. These methodologies escape traditional indexical forms of measurement and accounting and instead offer experimental modes of sensing, tracing, and mapping. They consider the representational potential of the landscape and subjectivities that defy normative codes. They investigate non-archival practices to construct spaces that give agency to spectral possibilities outside of standardised definitional frameworks.
Manley’s speculative and inverted infrastructures invoke the shadows and traces of the ‘Real’, whilst Humphries and Lee re-mediate forms of mapping and trace to give us new avenues of understanding place in a multi-perspectival age of place-making confusion. Both Roche and Dillon use the chemical processes of the darkroom to refract the explicit lens-based practices of the digital whilst Craig attempts to re-narrate place through affectual traces of the body and its pain. These material and conceptual strategies give rise to a more complex representation of place, one that hyper-realism erases through its over-arching attempts at ‘the Real’.
Featuring works by:
Carolyn Craig
Damian Dillon
Clare Humphries
Roy Lee
David Manley
Justine Roche
Image above: Roy Lee, History of the sky, 2023
Gallery images: Taken by Eunie Kim
