fig. (i)

fig. (i)

David Gates

Duration: February 9 – March 30, 2013

Qbox gallery is pleased to present David Gates’ (b. 1979) first solo exhibition in Greece, entitled fig. (i). The title of the show relates to the systems of referral between the images and the descriptions used in the scientific manuals and old natural history books, which are often used as the starting point and source of much of the work. These outdated sources of information, sometimes modified sometimes not highlight an interest in their obsession with order and totality and the impossibility of rationalising the objective world around us.

David Gates works with pinhole photography, found images and objects. Pinhole images, far from being nostalgic, authenticate the present, making it vibrant and shimmering by pushing the not too distant past away, opening up the future to the possibility of possibilities. 

Being a resident artist during a month on the island of Kea, Greece, Gates used a small van as a travelling darkroom, peering over fences, dodging shadows and scouring the roadsides. Finding usefulness in the neglected, the everyday and overlooked. Paying attention to the edges and in some cases eliminating the focus of a photograph in a book page, photographing overgrown trees which have long outlived their original plan or usefulness, or flattening a feather, removing its featheriness whilst allowing it to cling on to its undeniable objectness. These things seem to stand in for the objects or ideas that they actually are. 

The artist does not look for certain results to prove a theory and to make a virtue of trial and error, instead he plays at the border between the visible and invisible, somewhere in between things and meanings, between representations and actual things. He poses questions as an activity, uses method as a meaning and tries to open up a space for looking or relooking by removing images and things from the flow of time towards their inevitable disappearance.

[ more about the exhibition here (.pdf file)  ]