This passage, written by Deborah Proskow, is directly excerpted from the 2003 exhibition brochure.
By changing the scale of something that is small and familiar, it can be rendered suddenly strange, alien and potentially threatening. Scale, a proportional measurement between things, implies that larger is stronger, more powerful and in control whereas smaller is weaker, more vulnerable and at mercy of the larger. In the photoworks of British artists Clare Charnley, Penny McCarthy and Alexa Wright, and the multi-media installation work of Vancouver artist Fae Logie, natural phenomena such as earthworms, cobwebs, rats and waterscapes are presented as larger than normal and hence ominous. While exaggerated images can seem humorous, these elicit discomfort of folklore, fairy tales, dreams and nightmares.
Addressing a cultural fascination with fear, Charnley, McCarthy and Wright present their subjects out of context. What was considered manageable and properly in place has burgeoned out of control. Wright’s enormous earthworms emerge from hidden realms to confront human space and scale. Of her work Blind Flesh, Wright states,
“These blind, but sensuous creatures suggest an intelligence of the flesh which precedes, or circumvents, the intellect".” That human intellect cannot match unfathomable natural forces forms a premise for stories such as Moby Dick.
McCarthy’s magnified cobwebs allude to darkness, disuse and the decrepitude of deserted places. there are connotations of death, crypts and haunted houses. In movies, cobwebs are signifiers of imminent contact with phantoms, of trespassing upon a resting place and disturbing the dead. McCarthy has collected some 200 images from gardens, under beds and inside cupboards and sheds.
Imaginatively, these growths suggest unknown activity in secretive spaces that have taken on a life of their own. This effect is eerily heightened in McCarthy’s stark black-and-white photo-negative imagery.
In Charnley’s terrifying Ratman photoworks empty rat skins appear to come back to life to devour tiny human figurines scrambling to escape. Her doomsday tableaux trigger deep-seated horrors associated with disease-ridden pestilence reminiscent of medieval Europe and the bubonic plague. Culturally, the aggression of rats and their transgression into human space are so abhorrent it is spoken of rarely. Anyone who has encountered a rat will invariably remark on the rodent’s size (i.e. ‘it was as big as a cat…’). Rats propagate a sinister underworld that, in the world of folklore, streams steadily beneath consciousness.
Logie’s installation Beneath employs audio and visual images of water, sea, wharf and shore to submerge the viewer in subconscious activity. Utilizing scale reversal, Logie upsets the viewer’s sense of body size, where a larger-than-life dining room table and tea set create an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ re-visitation of childhood experience. Once beneath the table, fractured projected imagery and disembodied voices suspend the viewer in a realm of fantasy, dreams and nightmares. Grey Matter is a visual invitation into a subconscious vortex. Layered audio voices accompany a multi-mirrored video image of sunken tree branches. A spherical cone of reflections pulsates in erratic imagery, rendering a landscape that is more synaptic than corporeal.
Fae Logie is a Canadian artist whose practice operates within the registers of the scientific and the poetic, the conceptual and environmental. Embracing elements of sculpture, drawing, photography and video she utilizes the juxtaposition of found and manufactured objects within the context of real and imagined space. Inquiring into how people create a sense of identity though the ecology and history of place, Logie examines alternative means of engagement with our environment – be that wilderness or urban settings, human and non-human. Ensconced in critical observation, her work often employs an element of jest, subverting a purely objective inquiry by questioning the systems and methodologies that dictate our lives.
Interested in making correspondences between local and distant landscapes, she has exhibited across Canada and participated in international artist residencies and shows in Reykjavik, Iceland, King’s Lynn, UK, Whangarai, New Zealand and Trondheim, Norway. Logie is a founding member of the Vancouver-based land art collective, ‘Art Is Land Network’, with a history of collaborative outdoor projects in public spaces including Granville Island, Dr. Sun Yat-sen Park and the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
Logie moved to Bowen Island five years ago to be part of a co-housing community and work in a more rural setting, yet still be accessible to Vancouver. She grew up in Port Moody and lived in her family home on Burrard Inlet for most of her life. She has a MFA degree from the University of British Columbia, though initially she studied science at Simon Fraser University, a discipline that continues to inform her work.
To learn more about Fae, click here to view her website.
Alexa Wright is London-based artist working across photography, video, and interactive installation. In the late 1990s she became known for After Image, an award-winning series of photographs of people with phantom limbs. Since then, much of her practice has involved building reciprocal relationships with people with mental/physical differences, medical conditions and, most recently, with people in prison. As well as being beneficial for participants this way of working enables Alexa to gather personal accounts that intimately and empathetically address questions of human identity, otherness and vulnerability.
Alexa has engaged in several long term inter-disciplinary collaborations, for example with Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics and computer scientists at UCL (1999-2010), and an interdisciplinary team based in Toronto looking at the emotional and psychological effects of heart transplantation (2007-20). In 2015 she carried out a participatory project at two NHS Recovery Centres for people experiencing mental health crises. Alexa is currently working on Inside Stories, an Arts Council funded participatory video project in three prisons, and with respondents to HI-COVE: a scientific study into the effects of Long Covid on Black, Asian, and Arabic communities.
Alexa’s work has been widely shown internationally in festivals such as: FILE, SESI Art Gallery, Sao Paolo, Brazil; DaDaFest International, Liverpool, UK, International Women Artists’ Biennale, Incheon, Korea and Athens Photo Festival, Benaki Museum, Athens. Examples of solo exhibitions include: Toronto Photographers Workshop, Canada; Experimental Arts Foundation, Adelaide, Australia and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Alexa has works in a number of public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Wellcome Trust and various Universities.
To learn more about Alexa, click here to visit her website.
Penny McCarthy
Clare Charnley