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Smoke and Mirrors
Landscapes from the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art collection
Smoke and Mirrors draws on artworks from Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art’s collection in a group show exploring contemporary landscapes through photography, painting, sculpture, film, digitally generated artwork and drawing.
The exhibition features artwork by 15 contemporary artists and photographers who challenge our understanding of landscape through digitally rendered and manipulated imagery, artificial immersive environments and imaginative fictional worlds.
Days Lost
Katja Mayer and Peter Chadwick
2013
Colour inkjet print
Days Lost is a collaborative photographic project by German photographer Katja Mayer and English art director Peter Chadwick.
The photographs depict a mythical woodland landscape made up of disused buildings and abandoned vehicles often accompanied by a blanket of colourful paintball smoke. These structures are used by the gamers as hiding places during the game. The photographs, devoid of human presence, allude to the trace humankind leaves on the natural world while simultaneously blurring the lines between fiction and reality, seduction and horror.
The NORTH
Tim Brennan
2007
LightJet prints mounted on Perspex
‘The NORTH was developed between 2005–2006 through a series of journeys across northern Britain. What was encountered through travelling, arriving, stopping, and attending to particular conditions of light, weather and atmosphere was not sought out as subject matter but registered through presence.
The photographs were made using deliberately limited means: a low-resolution mobile phone camera. Initially held in the palm of the hand, these small digital images were later enlarged to monumental size. Printed at 112.5 × 150 cm and set behind thick perspex, each image becomes materially contained — held, edged, and visibly suspended. The framing is not incidental: the work insists on its own physical boundary, as something both seen and held in place.
What appears is not landscape as documentation, but an accumulation of looking over time. Colour, blur and surface displace descriptive clarity. The images hover between legibility and dissolution, between the particulars of a place and the refusal of representation.
This presentation revisits a body of work made twenty years ago. Written now, looking back across that distance, The NORTH is offered neither as statement nor as conclusion, but as a return: to a
way of working attentive to atmosphere, to duration, and to what remains when meaning is not pressed into form.’ – Tim Brennan
The Adventure and the Resolution
Chris Cornish
2010
HD video projection, looped
With a practice underpinned by a history of technology, Chris Cornish utilises apparatus such as the camera and computer to explore a singular view of the world. Carefully exploring the interstices occurring between seemingly incompatible media, Cornish’s work seeks to lift information, objects, and surroundings from virtual or historical sources, and transform them to ‘real’ space, recast as sculpture, photography, and film.
The Adventure and the Resolution documents a computer-generated aberration; the creation of an illusion that must reveal its mechanics to be sustained. Situated in a computer representation of a real environment, the camera circles, producing a film loop that becomes a contemporary Zoetrope; a pre-film animation device creating the illusion of motion from a sequence of still images in a spinning cylinder with slits the user looks through as it rotates.
Enclosures
Nicola Maxwell
2015
Inkjet prints mounted to dibond
Nicola Maxwell’s ongoing series of large-scale photographs, Enclosures, examine the recent profusion of simulated environments and man-made interior landscapes across the UK.
Maxwell’s photographs are investigations into both the construction and consumption of these sites, whose uses range from commerce and leisure to ‘conservation’.
The artist’s subject matter spans buildings designed to further our understanding of the natural world – such as tropical gardens and aquariums – to those which employ real foliage, artificial greenery and ‘natural imagery in order to create hallucinatory, hyper-real environments.
Kill Zones
Craig Ames
2013
Assault on Chemical Weapons Bunker – North Yorkshire
Colour Fujitran prints housed in lightboxes
Kill Zones is a series of photographic works of ‘Mil-Sim’ (airsoft military simulation) gameplay arenas in the UK. Unlike paintballing, Mil-Sim players are fundamentally concerned with recreating an ‘authentic’ combat experience, often based upon the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The work explores the phenomenon of simulated combat, its fluid relationship with reality and fantasy and how, in turn, pockets of the British landscape have been subjugated and transformed in order to become metaphysical theatres of recreational conflict.
Black Narcissus
Cornford & Cross
2014
Inkjet print
Black Narcissus is a video artwork by Cornford & Cross that transforms stock market data from the period 2003-2013 into a computer-generated mountain landscape. It visually represents the undulations of the stock market during this period.
The print exhibited here is taken from the video artwork.