MA Photography at LCC has an international reputation for research-led, conceptually driven gallery practices, and has nurtured many celebrated photographers and artists from around the globe.
Students explore the ever-expanding boundaries of the photographic medium, developing a distinctive and interdisciplinary body of work, with work exhibiting this year at LCC Postgraduate Shows 2017: Show 1.
We highlight some of the projects on show…
Tomoko Suwa-Krull
Meet You There
Tomoko Suwa-Krull, ‘Meet You There’
“One day I woke up, still in my dream, confused, and I did not know where I was – London or Tokyo. There was a feeling of being somewhere but I could not remember if it was from my childhood or a recent memory.”
In ‘Meet You There’, Tomoko explores landscapes, how we perceive them, internalise and transform them into mental landscapes. The combination of a large-scale wall paper, framed profile and the accompanying book shares this experience with the viewer.
Her subjects mental landscapes let us see their story, conveying our emotions, transforming us, and encouraging us to create our own stories.
John Hipwell
Standing Wave, Change Hands
John Hipwell, ‘Standing Wave, Change Hands’
How can technology and the scientific method be used in the service of art? Hipwell’s practice has a significant computational component; transforming, decomposing and reconstructing image information across a range of media.
In ‘Standing Wave, Change Hands’ a lightbox displays a 35mm negative of a pair of hands from 1958. The image has been decomposed into individual frequencies that correspond to the ripples of intensity across its surface, and these are rendered as a pair of oil paintings. This painted spectrum (magnitude and phase) is reconstructed into an image by a “painting recognition” apparatus, fusing traces of painted brushstrokes with intensities from the original photograph.
Each of us is a node in a standing wave that stretches back across the generations, changing hands.
Mingdi Wang
Rebuild
Mingdi Wang, ‘Rebuild’
Mingdi Wang’s practice explores the relationship between real space and photographic space. The time and space of a photograph displayed and isolated on a wall is quite different from our experience of real time and space. In this respect the photograph is quite remote from the viewer.
The artist is interested in connecting these two spaces by involving the viewer in the representational space of the photograph. In his art piece Rebuild, Mingdi constructed a concrete wall which he then photographed. This photographic print is displayed within a broken gallery wall, turning the photograph into a part of the actual gallery space, inviting the viewer to approach and even touch the work.
Agnès Villette
Haunted
Agnès Villette, ‘Haunted’
Agnès is a photographer and visual artist whose practice is research-based and multi-disciplinary. She explores photography, texts and sounds to create installations that reflect upon ecological and political issues. Influenced by the theoretical writing generated by the Anthropocene and Dark Ecology, she develops projects that merge art and science. Informed by her career as a journalist, she connects Geiger counter data and interviews with the local population to create a visual discourse.
In ‘Haunted’, she questions our paradoxical relation with the nuclear industry, our energy dependency and the unresolved politics of nuclear waste. The project is rooted in the Cotentin peninsula in France, which uniquely features every stage of the nuclear industrial cycle, from production, to refuelling, to waste repository. Using collected data, cartography, uranium glass, sound and images, she invites the viewer into a direct encounter with radioactivity.
Nassim Rad
The Origin of My World
Nassim Rad, ‘The Origin of My World’
“My final piece is a dispute with the issue of thought and act, showing the process of decision-making through abstract imagery. By using cameraless photography, I eliminated the technical eye and focused on the craft of painting with light and chemical means. Traces of manual labour become visible in the individual pieces and serve as a metaphor for the complex and demanding step to execute an action.”
“Influenced by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Man Ray, I strive to make a work that has potential for triggering empathy and putting a stamp of reality into the more and more digital world we live in.”
View more projects from MA Photography 2017 on their show website. See more from LCC Postgraduate Shows 2017.