“Imagination is an Overused Cliché”

Exhibition notes
The title of this exhibition series points to the artistic imagination as an
overrated process inasmuch as the terms inspiration, creation, originality
and genius point to an ineffable realm of magic and build the myth of the
artist as the sole agent in artistic production. The situation presented by
such a myth is approximate to the story of Genesis in relation to the
theory of evolution in that the processes of artistic production are
mistakenly attributed to a self-created (and therefore ahistorical) creator—
the autonomously inspired imagination of the artist.
Contrary to this notion of the artist as a masturbatory font of creation is
the assertion that artists and their imaginations are partly conditioned by
their obtaining histories and social processes. More specifically, the
imagination and the painterly eye cannot be taken as self-sufficient
systems since they rely heavily on already existing technologies and
conventions of visual language. It is in light of this assertion that the
current exhibition attempts to investigate a particular method of visual
production that is closely related to painting and has influenced it greatly
since its development—photography. Moreover, photography as it
functions not only as an extension of the painter’s eye but also as a
perceptual prosthetic that is accompanied by and brings to bear whole
economies of images and practices of looking that effectively structure
and influence the imagination. From the first daguerreotypes to digital
and satellite imaging today, photography has changed not only the look of
the world but our ways of looking at and experiencing it. By this reflexive
approach, the painters in this exhibition series hope to clarify issues and
questions involving perception as can be observed from the relationship
between painting and photography, as much for themselves as for
anyone.
Working from the idea of photography as a means of recording specific
moments in time, Catalina Africa paints a cloud from a photograph.
Conventionally, photographs contain identifiable markers of history such
as clothing, architecture, particular events, or even an exact date and
time. Africa tries to minimize this by choosing a photograph of a
particularly nondescript cumulus cloud and transposing it into a painting
on canvas. The translation itself contributes to the effacement of the
photographic document as evidence since painting as a medium
possesses relatively less evidential weight than photography. Hence, by
choosing as temporally indistinct an object as a cloud, Africa, by means of
painting, distances it further from the idea of evidential experience (e.g.
some time, somewhere, some guy saw a cloud and took a photo), and
closer to an idealization. In other words, what appears as a simple
rendering of a cloud amounts to an attempt to negotiate the qualitative
leap from document to representation that occurs with the negation of the
processes of memory (the personal) and temporal fixity (the fleeting) in
favor of the universal.
Approached from roughly the opposite direction is Maria Jeona’s self-
referential work, which aims to imbue the depicted moment with the
emotional quality of the representation. What presents itself as a candid
snapshot is in fact a thoroughly staged pretense. Replete with a pre-
arranged mass of colors, the work attempts to confer upon the subject the
quality of joyfulness, which may or may not actually have been the case at
the time the photograph was taken. Playing on the unease some people
feel when asked to smile for the camera in order to ‘look’ happy, Jeona
joins in on the farce (vibrant props and all) and forces the ideal upon
herself as if to poke at Jean-Luc Godard’s declaration that “photography is
truth.” If this statement is true, then the ‘image’ of the cheerful girl
portrayed in the photograph should allow the viewer (the painter, in
particular) at least a retroactive claim to happiness. However, the mere
fact that photography involves several mediations from the initial framing
to the final editing turns Godard’s proclamation into an empty sound-byte.
Subsequently, the work’s attempt to fabricate a memory is an inevitable
failure that serves to point out the objective discrepancies between image
and reality.
Similarly, Eunice Lacaste and Paola Germar explore these discrepancies
through their portraits. Lacaste’s ‘Dysfunctional Family’ employs
exaggeration as a means of insuring a moment against the fickleness of
memory. As when we repeatedly press a pen to paper to ensure that the
mark is clearly visible, Lacaste intensifies the facial expressions of her
subjects: a group of friends with herself square in the center. Even the
choice of straightforward composition where the figures are aligned along
the central and corner axes strengthens the image by rendering it static
as though if a thing were to move, it would get lost.
While the process of image modification is not unique to either painting
or photography, what is important to note here is the notion of images as
constructions borne and modified by the intents, wishes and choices of
their producers. As such, the self-portrait of Paola Germar takes this point
on the literal level.
Whereas Jeona concerns herself with staging the past, and Lacaste with
preserving the future, Germar is pre-occupied with understanding the in-
between. That is to say, her project focuses on the variable factor played
by the painter herself and explores the actual process of conversion from
the photograph to the painting. Taking habit and turning it into method,
Germar subjects her painting to modifications that correspond with her
emotional state. Hence, the singular image we are presented with was
arrived at through a process of erasure and layering as her expressive
treatments varied randomly with the vicissitudes of emotion. By
disclosing this ‘process’, Germar reminds us of the image’s susceptibility
to the subjective despite conventional assignations of truth-value.
Tackling the tropes of construction and convention from a different
strategy, Caroline Ongpin and Regina Jardolin use combined images to
discuss conventions that inform our ways of looking. Ongpin chooses two
images randomly from an old roll of film and arranges them, one inverted
below the other. Jardolin, in turn, takes two screenshots from a film and
superimposes one over the other. What results from these combinations is
an interpretive loop of questions between the two images present in each
of the paintings. Viz:
Are these photographs taken from the same place? Is the
scene of the man playing with a child taking place inside the
building in the other image? What is the significance of
placing the exterior scene over that of the interior? How are
we able to say that the scene with the child is taking place
indoors?
In the case of Jardolin: Is the woman with her feet on the
man’s back the same woman on the right? If the scene with
the man and woman is post-coital, is the sensual expression
of the larger woman taken from before or after intercourse?
What can be said of the woman’s position(s) in the painting?
As such, the works presented by Ongpin and Jardolin unavoidably call
upon conventions of reading that involve narrative sequence (i.e. left to
right, top to bottom), conceptual dominance (i.e. size, emphasis, etc.) and
other perceivable relationships between the excerpts that they present
(e.g. similarity, difference, proximity, correspondence, etc). Given the
exhibition’s concern of investigating the ways of looking that inform
painting and photography, the implications of these conventions take
precedence over the meanings we are able to derive from the images
themselves.
By providing us with a minimum of clues with which to decipher their
work and leaving us with more questions than answers, Ongpin and
Jardolin return us to the thrust of the exhibition by effectively highlighting
the act of questioning and the central role played by perceptual and
linguistic conventions in the processes of viewing and interpretation.
Beyond that and similar to the approach of conceptual artists’ work
concerning photography, the works here require and direct us to re-
examine our assumptions about the way things appear and, more
importantly, the ways by which we look at them.

The Curators