The exhibition 'Sharing a View: Contemporary Art from Glasgow' featured GSA Fine Art staff in a major exhibition shown in four different locations.

My contribution to the Exhibition consisted of 10 digital prints of collages I made as part of a body of a larger body of work consisting of; prints, collage and paintings created in response to the Storyville Portraits. The little known photographer E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville portraits are a series of photographic portraits of sex workers in New Orleans’ red-light district, circa 1912, rediscovered (& reproduced) by Lee Friedlander in 1970, when they were exhibited in MOMA. Of particular interest to me in ‘Storyville Portraits’ is the context of the portraits- or rather, the indefinite, mutative nature of that context. In Barthean terms, both the Studium and Punctum of the photographs remain unusually opaque; the negatives were discovered in the 1960s, and the original prints are now lost to us. Their anonymity, privacy, and personalism contrast strikingly with their disproportionate cultural footprint since their exposure and (mass) reproduction in the 1960s.
In the collages and Prints I have made for this Exhibition, following on from a previous project ‘Beggars Teeth’ (blog available here: https://beggarsteeth.com), I am engaging with the concept of painting as the ‘score’ of the ‘performance of making’ – objects, like ‘Storyville Portraits’, that inhabit a kind of limbo; the portrait as expressive, continuing, disembodiment are all key ideas in my ongoing investigations. I draw on the work of contemporary theorists such as Isabelle Graw and David Josewitz: "In painting the marking, storage or accumulation of time are simultaneous and ongoing. Painting somewhat paradoxically is LIVE; an alive medium.” (David Josewitz 2017). I have incorporated and developed elements of digital images throughout my process, both indirectly, in preliminary studies for paintings. This experimentation is influenced by the work of, Albert Oehlen, and Michaela Eichwald and Adrian Ghenie, Asper Jorn. I will seek to contrast and compose the digital, alongside the organic, accidental, the overtly gestural. This confusion of the organic and the synthetic is intended as a ‘mirror’ to the notoriously enigmatic ‘Storyville’ portraits, with their meshing of ‘polite’, private femininity with the ‘public’, performative role of the prostitutes, and their eerie mixture of intimacy and anonymity. The direction of my project rests both in speaking ‘to’ the ‘Storyville Portraits’ themselves and speaking ‘beyond’ them, to the spaces beyond the edges of the photograph, the faces scratched out by Bellocq: “the image as representation of an individual and as operation of art” (Ranciere).
The short film Ventilator was also screened as part of the Exhibition.

A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition. One of my prints was selected for a poster for the show.