Historic overlays

Idris Khan and Stephen Willats have a show on at the Victoria Milo gallery this month. We went along last night to the opening. Khan has produced seductice ‘photos’ by overlaying negatives of musical scores, texts and existing photographys, notable the Bechers.

Williat’s work, which still looks the work from that late 60’s is always a joy to see. I’ve been a fan since my college days – a concept driven artist that looks to mapping social relationships and the arrangement that society adopts as it accomodate indifference.

Jörg Colberg, who blogs about Fine Art Photography here, points towards a cracking article about Khan here. He also points out that the overlay technique has been worked up well by the artist Jason Salavon who has produced some stunning works. 121 Homes for Sale, LA/Orange County 2001 (Above) is an incredible image , and at a conceptual level incredible potenent when thinking about identification via time. Many of the web services I look at are precisely operatin on the same plane – data eveloving over time, offering the audience an oppotunity to see the development and motion of the world around them. Much of the visual graphic language that we encounter is ‘message’ – singular moments of communication. Do check out 100 Special Moments, Homes for Sale, The Class of 1988 & 1967, Figure 1.(Every Playboy Centerfold, 1988-1997) and erm, 76 Blowjobs

Salamon has an incredible body of work along these lines and an adopter of new technologies – which he discloses fully here.

In 2003, he produced the installation The Late Night Triad (Below) – which is “64 nights’ worth of the major US late night talk shows have been aligned and averaged using basic transformations. The result is a triptych of video projections with soundtrack, presenting an amalgamation of monologues which reveals the ghosts of repetitious structure and nightly activity.“

What’s really nice about this aesthetics is the appropiation of media to generate more media – by looking through the image and acknowledging its position in time, more sense can generated about the role of the media – something insanely hard to write – yet far more easy to show. Basically – enabling super-eyes on the media landscape.

Khan has now produced a film ‘A Memory…after Bach’s Cello Suites,’ based upon this technique of overlay and is showing at the inIVA from Sept 12-22.