GUEST WRITER - Christopher Jones

Distillation

Slow down. Stop. Remain still. Breathe and look around you. Now, take a closer look at the street side poster, before it disappears to the memory of your day. Still breathing, take another look at that object, but look at it closely; very closely, ignoring completely the persuasion of time. Then, slowly, become conscious of the gradual breakdown in the poster from it’s smooth strokes of coloured uniformity to it’s manufactured optical syntax; move beyond the complexity of line, contour and shade revealed at the object, as your gaze enters a direct relationship with the once vicarious thing. Now, shift this new gaze – slowly – to those all too familiar scenes and objects so readily missed, and consider the newness of what appears before you. This is what John Niland and Andrew McDougall offer in Distillation. A new perspective.

This new perspective refines the assumptions of it’s former self. Where once from the perspective of a speeding car or late night net connection, images and objects flashed by at post-modern speed, Niland and McDougall’s new perspective offers penetration to the essence of appearance. Beneath the shimmering surface.

Or as Plato would have it, beyond the shadows of the cave . For Plato, the interior of the cave held fast the cavorting shadows of imagery – all third rate copies of reality beamed to the wall via the light of a fire. All that was seen were repeats of objects, themselves mere reflections of distant ideals. At the same time, and beyond the limits of the cave, the essence of absolute reality beamed from the sun with the clarity of pure knowledge. A penetrative brilliance distilling all illusion to it’s alchemical fundament: to it’s true form.

And these are the bifurcated elements of the cave reworked by Niland and McDougall: shadow and sun; image and light. Niland on the inside, dancing with the shadows; McDougall on the outer, refracting the sun’s ray.

In it’s present environment, the cave extends it’s shadowy effect along endless city streets, embalmed by reams of vacuous figurines, some ripped, some destroyed, but all glistening beneath layers of perpetual application. Amidst the layers, John Niland discovers subject matter that ranges as broadly as the medium with which he chooses to dance. Contemporary images of cinema, pop art and nightclub abstractions are retuned through large-scale displays of reworked street side advertising; manufactured jams of cut-up imagery, all Broadway boogie-woogie Burroughs style. Through Niland’s cut and paste detournement, the forgotten essence of oversize posters re-connect to their audience through a slam-dance of mimetic rupture.

But this is no exclusive gig. Niland’s work destabilizes asymmetrical image-audience relations of the purely retinal, corrupted by the image machines of capitalism, to a democratic conversation with the sensational, allowing personal interpretation for all who choose to dance.

To facilitate this relationship, Niland actively reworks media massaged elements of oversized optical violence with the Surrealist technique of hypotaxis and the formal application of tactility. Upon large scale anti-canvases of found cardboard are layered collages of wood, letter and face; line, colour and shape; memory, drive and desire, all cut from as many posters. In doing so, familiar push button images and trigger symbols, applied to the unconscious to form guiding syntactical streams, are liberated to new modes of translation and personal interpretation. It is a dis-organized syntax of rips, cuts and shreds that project from the volumous canvas to revaluate all our billboards of visual entrapment. The result is a felt language of the seen. A remade haptic syntax. A personalized distillation of the shadows.

When asked by author of The Philosophers Stone, Peter Marshall, “what for you then is the ultimate goal of alchemy”?, practicing alchemist Robert Vrum replied, “to release something from matter” . With this, Vrum illustrates the theoretical terrain and modus operandi contained within Andrew McDougall’s work.

Using the same affective image scale employed by Niland, McDougall moves away from the exploration of micro relationships inside the cave, to a macro perspective observing connectivity within all materiality. Utilising processes of visual alchemy, McDougall effectively refracts the light of the sun back into the darkened cave, piercing every object with the pure light of knowledge to expose a universal essence existing beyond the limiting definition of matter.

Contained to large digitally produced photographs, objects include jelly beans, molluscs, silicon chips and bath oils, all inextricably ordered throughout the image. At first, each object appears distinct from the other through separations of design, contrast and visual history, but with time, and almost without notice, the balance of optical space shifts. The white light background surrounding each object creeps to the fore, around and about each item, until it presses against the face of the image itself. Mercurially, the light then penetrates each object from all sides moving over, under and through, liberating from shadow every element of the seen until all that is visible are variations of the light itself. The object disappears. All that remains is distilled essence in the pure light of the sun.

To extend this process beyond the image frame, McDougall employs the grid. Applied through computerized postproduction, a fine white line system is positioned directly at the face of the image, reinforcing the presence and activity of the image itself. Within this activity, the grid has long been appreciated as a universalising modernist tool, extending centrifugally the contents of the image beyond it’s finite borders. For Piet Mondrian, abstractionist and popularizer of the grid, it allowed access to spirit and to being. It is infinite. It is a structure without beginning or end, and to gaze through it is to access a boundless space of possibility, captivating the endless coverage of the sun. Consequently, what McDougall captures in these large scale prints are but fragments of a greater cosmological whole; a microscopic snapshot of essence, too massive to contain. As a result, McDougall’s work reveals techniques applied by Andreas Gursky in his macro orderations of crowds and commodity, but where Gursky deals with definite mass, McDougall deals with potential beyond matter, and through matter, to it’s own distillation.

The process of distillation then is for Niland and McDougall an investigation beyond contemporary boundaries: for Niland, beyond ordered visual syntax and the image surface; and for McDougall, beyond object matter and the picture’s frame. For them both, and for the new audience, Distillation moves away to connection with essence.

Plato, ‘The Republic’, Penguin, London, 1987.
Marshall, Peter., ‘The Philosophers Stone’, Macmillan, London, 2000.p.378