Evanescent

James McArdle

Evanescent: 15-24 March, 90 Fletcher Street, Castle-maine, Victoria.

Castlemaine State Festival

EXHIBITION

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JAMES MCARDLE

I am a practice-based researcher, investigating metaphoric uses of focal effects and the differences between human and camera vision. Findings from this research have been the subject of exhibitions and papers, published and for international conferences with a range of focus and themes including anthropology, social sciences, Austra-lian studies, scientific photography, poetics and aesthetics.

I am Associate Professor in the Image: Photography/Graphics School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Aus-tralia.

See:http://www.deakin.edu.au/arts-ed/scca/staff-directory2.php?username=mcardle

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This series revisits a childhood de-light and fascination with the pro-jected image and the natural world.

Evanescent is a new series produced in 2013 which pre-mieres at this Castlemaine State Festival 15-24 March 2013.

The series revisits a childhood delight and fascination with the projected image and the natural world. For me then, as it is now, a magnifying glass was a wonder; its simple optics twisted light into abstract comas and sci-fi aberrations; able to compact a whole view into a luminous, paradoxically inverted phantom that could fit literally into the palm of my hand. By curling fingers and thumb around the lens and cupping both hands around the elu-sive rays, and by peering into the space in which I had trapped them, I fancied that I had entered into the secret workings of the eye.

Chrysalis, for example, appears as a scenic projection from a hand-held lens and simultaneously as the litter of the forest floor. It is produced with a makeshift camera-obscura. The nebulous silhouettes of trees, some blurred under the passing clouds of a summer wind resolve here and there into crisp lines curled across the surface of a fallen leaf on which a moth chrysalis ad-heres. The leaf assumes Brobdingnagian proportions and thick-ness as the evanescent image shrinks and is foreshortened then dissolves in the enlarged dust and grit. It manifests the unique sight anchored at this fixed point, to reveal what we might see if we were to become vegetable or mineral. Near and far, large and small, superimpose, trigonometrically exact in their adjacency and spatial relations, presenting us with a located point of view.

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Why? I want to understand more intimately the interior of the natural landscape, rather than any ‘scene’ of human presence, or the con-text of any cultural landmark. In the steep, bush locations in which I am making these images, my means are necessarily makeshift; my camera and an old manual-aperture lens able to be carried in a backpack with a black T-shirt as a 'dark-tent'. The project is not sys-tematic but intuitive and responsive to prevailing conditions and the effect on the projection caused by sun, shade, weather and situa-tion. I am guided by the response of objects, textures and surfaces to the projected image and how they modulate and map it. 

This is landscape, but not from a human point of view.

James McArdle, March 2013

KEYWORDS: Touch, proprioception, surface, image, synæsthesia.

EVANESCENT: THE LANDSCAPE SELF

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Chrysalis 2013

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Quartz 3013

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Seam 2013

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Gold Leaf 2013

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Featherlight 2013

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Gully 2013

Cave 2013

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Slate 2013

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Camera 2013

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Clay 2013

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Skull 2013