PRESS RELEASE
Across the Water
Symbolism in the digital wilderness
Paintings by Dan Hays
24 November–23 December 2007
Friday-Sunday 12-5pm, or by appointment
Private view: Friday 23 November, 6-9pm
Modernism’s emblematic grid is now the ubiquitous matrix through which we perceive digital information. The grid’s ambiguous nature, offering a sense of the scientific at the same time as the metaphysical, is virtually all we have, and it’s almost entirely subliminal.
Collectively titled Colorado Impressions, my paintings are concerned with the intentions of Impressionist painting and the mechanics of digital image compression down to the pixel level. An interest in the immateriality of digital imagery and the screen, combined with painting’s traditional focus on the paradox of representing light in coloured substance is at the core of the project. These meticulous and mediated reproductions of low quality images are necessarily flawed, claiming back for paint fragments from the infinity of digital photographs on the Internet.
The title Across the Water suggests many things. In the context of previous work, it most directly refers to the land of the New World across the Atlantic Ocean. Another Dan Hays, living in Colorado USA, was discovered through an Internet search in 1999. His website consists of numerous photographs of the Rocky Mountain landscape surrounding his home, as well as a live web-cam. With his permission a series of oil paintings derived from this imagery was embarked on, exploring the distortions of low-resolution and image compression. Visual material is now collected from across the whole of Colorado, and it’s essential to the project that it has never been physically visited. Colorado is a mythic place, the land of COLOR. Indeed, it is from a metaphysical and romantic standpoint that recent work has increasingly engaged with the subject.
Across the Water suggests Northern European mythology, in particular the Isle of the Dead, a subject tackled by romantic painters of the nineteenth century, such as Arnold Böcklin. The River Styx in Greek mythology could also be considered in this light. This touches on the very personal experience of losing my father last year. Bill lived in the pine-clad mountains of the Auvergne region of France for the last twelve or so years with his second wife Catherine. The influence of this landscape has been profound on my development into the landscape genre. Approaching equivalent landscapes from Colorado over the last eight years through the medium of the Internet and a namesake has been an act of emotional dislocation and intensification, with the physical experience of the Auvergne landscape a silent, grounding, influence – even if it’s another adopted land. My dad’s ashes were scattered into one of the tributaries of the River Loire.
Shepherd, across the water,
you are scarcely having a good time,
sing baïlèro, lèro
Scarcely, and you sing
baïlèro, lèro!
Shepherd, how will you cross?
Over there is the wide stream,
sing baïlèro, lèro!
Wait for me, I’m coming to look for you,
baïlèro, lèro
Translated folk song, Baïlèro, from Songs of the Auvergne, orchestral arrangement by Joseph Canteloube.
Romantic association with Tennyson’s symbolist poem The Lady of Shallot can also be considered. She is cursed to reside in an island castle on a river, only viewing the world through a mirror, ‘to weave the mirror's magic sights’ into the form of a tapestry. The tale was also the subject of 19th Century painters such as John William Waterhouse and William Holman Hunt. The poem is often read as an allegory for the work of an artist and the dangers of personal isolation as opposed to direct experience.
Symbolist painters of the late nineteenth century concerned themselves with images of windows:
As a transparent vehicle, the window is that which admits light – or spirit – into the initial darkness of a room. But if glass transmits, it also reflects. And so the window is experienced by the symbolist as a mirror as well – something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated being. Flowing and freezing; glace in French means glass, mirror, and ice; transparency, opacity, and water. In the associative system of symbolist thought this liquidity points in two directions. First, towards the flow of birth – the amniotic fluid, the “source” – but then, towards the freezing into stasis or death – the unfecund immobility of the mirror.
Rosalind Krauss, Grids, 1979 (from The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Popular Myths, MIT Press)
Today that mirror/window has its equivalent in the TV or computer screen, with elemental associations to the flood of images generated by the Internet (the digital wilderness, to romanticise), and the fluidity of the space between the virtual and actual. Below the shimmering surface of the screen there are a multitude of invisible agencies in the generation of what comes to our perception, suggestive of the spectral realm. These range, for example, from the complex and often arbitrary cataloguing processes of search engines down to the abstracting effects of data compression and corruption. Veracity, transience, expression, timelessness, physicality, uniqueness, and all qualities that are used to explore the entwined relationship of painting and photography are dissolved by a medium that can both simulate painterly effects and function as an impartial collector of information.
Claude Monet’s late water lily paintings represent the screen and its complexities. The surface of the water abstractly reflects plants around the pond and the sky and supports floating clumps of vegetation. The subject functions as an allegory of painting: we have the actuality of paint on the surface and the illusory, reflected, space beyond, the heavens, or below in the shadowy depths. The viewer is left floating.
The Sea of Solaris, described in Stanislaw Lem’s novel, is another watery link to notions of the digital and virtual, a generator of perfect simulations.
The digital realm is a shadowy, ethereal, parallel world - an endlessly refracted trace of humanity. We can only engage with a few fugitive images that emerge, half frozen, from this endlessly reproducible, unverifiable, and immaterial source. The analogy is memory.
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A further interpretation of ideas arising from the exhibition was developed for the online journal www.slashseconds.org, No.9, through the issue's theme, The Vanishing Point: the Viscious and Virtuous Circle.