Ian Llewelyn Richard Powell Jennie Savage
We live in media. We are defined by the media through which we live. I am not referring here to the news media or mass media, the streams of information which surround us, even though these play a significant role in shaping our lives. Instead, it is the idea that we are carried, guided, and enabled to act by the conditions in which we find ourselves, for example, a body, an oxygen-filled atmosphere, a planet where gravity operates at 9.8m/s2. I know the world through the senses that my body makes available to me, and am able to make my way to the bar without hanging on to objects because gravity keeps me in regular contact with the ground. In the history of ideas surrounding the meaning and status of art, one of the most important contemporary theories asserts that, in an artwork, we find the artist negotiating with a medium (e.g., paint, clay, photography), seeing what it can do, what transformations it can achieve, what can happen when the artist works at the limits of a medium’s possibility. These negotiations are valuable, it is claimed, because they make us aware of the way in which we handle and respond to the media that define own lives. This theory seems particularly appropriate to Limited, for the media requirements of the exhibition - A4 size, computer-generated images - are both strict (in terms of size) yet wholly indeterminate (the possibilities that lie within computer-generated imagery). How have the three artists Ian Llewelyn, Richard Powell, and Jennie Savage worked between the fixed and the infinitely open? One might expect scale to be paramount to Ian Llewelyn’s prints of distressed Parisian billboards given the difference in size between A4 and billboard, but it is more questions of colour and origination which come to the fore in his work. Llewelyn’s prints display the tell-tale sheen of the computer-processed image, an effect generated largely by algorithms bunching or blocking similar colours together; why bother remembering where ten near-identical colours are in an area when you can reduce them all to one calculation? The beauty of this effect in Llewelyn’s prints is that rivers and shimmers of algorithmic colour complement the organic layering and tearing of the billboard. An intriguing possibility emerges at this point. Both the billboard and the computer image are arenas in which one world can be pasted next to another, often in such a way that we can’t see the join or, alternatively, in ways which break up the meaning and order of an image. We might assume that Llewelyn’s photographs are authentic representations of the original billboards, but it is also possible that the tears and cuts of the board are cuts and pastes that Llewelyn has crafted himself. Given the varieties of image which can be generated by computer, Jennie Savage has concentrated on the seemingly simple process of creating line drawings using the mouse as mark maker. She has also achieved a child-like quality in her images, through her use of line and her depiction of animals. Each image shows an encounter between two or more species, creating the impression that these are illustrations by a child of a story in which the animals appear. This child-like quality is surely no mistake. With patience and an ability to draw, extremely fine and naturalistic detail can be realized on screen with a mouse. What then are we to make of Savage’s eschewal of graphic complexity? Particularly notable are the categories of line she has achieved: the continuous jagged zig-zag of the grass, the frenetic zig-zag on the wolf, the confident sweeps of the tree-trunks, and the tentative curves on the animal outlines. These might seem unremarkable but together, as a cluster of categories, they show what happens when an artist works against the abundance of opportunity offered by a medium and, instead, endeavours to create a style that is associated with media at the other end of the technological spectrum. Guiding a pencil is wholly different from guiding a mouse: the former sticks to a point whereas the latter rolls or slides. A wavering here, a sweep there: in mimicking the basic, Savage brings to light little known truths about the hand’s interaction with the mouse. In contrast, Richard Powell’s die drawings are made by hand, traced from digital photographs on the computer screen. Several tracings are then placed one on top of the other and scanned. The four images result from the same tracings being arranged and scanned in different orders. Powell’s decision to hand-draw the die outlines, and in such a physical and direct manner, is fascinating. Presumably, outlines from photographs can be produced digitally, and translucent paper exists which can be fed into a computer printer. So what comes from this interaction between digits and the digital? Human intervention in a numerical, probabilistic process? The attempt to determine the indeterminate? This literal layering of sheets gives us numerous metaphorical layers of meaning. The fact that the images underneath become fainter with each layer of tracing paper generates both the effect of the die moving away from us or towards us and the effect of time, of a spin that has yet to resolve itself. The faintest die image seems to coalesce from out of the cloudy grey possibilities of graphite smudges on tracing paper. And it is usually only the uppermost tracing which reminds the eye that it is looking at a die: underneath, as the lines fade, the dots on the dice become falling coins, allies in the material expression of chance. In these works, one size doesn’t fit all. Rather, all is revealed through possible worlds: not so much the worlds depicted, of billboards, rabbits, and dice, but of the worlds we construct as we interpret the images, and the possibilities we find in the gaps between the physical and the digital. If, during the course of viewing this exhibition, you do find yourself having to hang on to furniture or other fixtures, then maybe your engagement with the media on show has had more of an affect on your view of the world than you thought possible.Clive Cazeaux