| I Could Have Been Anyone |

SEA Gallery 06 – 14 May 2010

70 St. Johns St. London EC1M 4DT

Private View: Wednesday 05 May, from 7pm

Curated by Mary George

New work by contemporary photographers Fiona Yaron-Field, Spencer Rowell and David George.

The Cabinet, Fiona Yaron-Field

I have a cabinet. Now and again I open its doors.  Inside there resides a collection of miniatures.  They have been there for years. Tiny objects that I used to keep well organised in groups but over time have been neglected.  They have lost their balance and are all mixed up: babies lie with monsters, animals have fallen on people, the natural world in a heap.  I rummage through my collection allowing myself to be drawn to one or another character. I can almost hear them call me. I take a selection and with the same spontaneity I find the setting. This process follows intuition, there is no planned construction. The thoughts are stories from the imagination. Time and age are immaterial. It is just like I played as a child, bringing these characters to life. I hear them speak as I move them about, but now, as an adult, I don’t voice them out loud. Now, I photograph them and the act is expressed visually.

I capture the scene through a reflection, this reflection distorts and blurs the event. It turns what is figurative into narrative and somehow the distorted reflection heightens and crystallizes the real unconscious story. In the safety of the photographic frame the darker nature of our relationships are exposed. The relationship between a man and woman, and a woman to herself. The photograph is not a record of this process, it is part of it. It acts as a mirror reflecting back the hidden parts of oneself allowing the unconscious inner world to surface.

Spencer Rowell

like addicts in denial
Is the grief we endure too much to bear?
we fill our lives with distractions
the whole problem of personal misery is rooted in our fear
and denial of death

as meaningful as life
(for of course creatures are immortal as they are ignorant of death)
is to know that one is mortal
Why am I unprepared
to be even inquisitive in this that society itself doesn’t equip
a state that I find uncomfortable, so.

tasks and transitions of adult life involve  loss
How do I enrich my inner world
to balance the sadness to what has gone
when all our relationships come to an end
In a moment of appropriate grief
I accept the inevitability of my own limitations
And eventual death

The Gingerbread House, David George

These images look at the idea of the uncanny in  a collection of photographs of utilitarian buildings and architecture. Pumping stations, park keepers lodges and portaloo’s make up some of the subjects haunted by this concept and look at an idea that goes back to at least the Enlightenment, an idea made famous by Freud in his paper of 1919 called Das Unheimliche  (The Unhomely). These images aim to highlight the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something that is not simply weird or mysterious, but in the words of Freud, “ strangely familiar”.