Roving Light

Opening night: Thursday 12 June, Late Night Art East 6–8:30pm

‘Roving Light’, curated by Gerard Carson, features a selection of works by QSS artists as part of Belfast Photo Festival.

Curator’s Note:

The ubiquity of photography in our current era often belies its strangeness as a process and medium. News images, advertisements, social media posts, and snapshots are dispersed amongst one another in an intangible zone where it becomes difficult to discern one from the other and attention becomes disordered or overwhelmed. Smartphone technology makes everyone a producer of images, a means of experiencing the world from a distance.

In recent times, there has been a growing concern as to how the image in the age of digital media and AI has impacted upon visual art. Some decry this excess of visual stimuli as an assault on the senses that dulls creativity and imagination. Others heralding the dawn of a new age of artistic freedom, unbounded by the limitations of physical material. These discourses orbit around a wider debate regarding the politics of image making, artistic autonomy and the control of images for ulterior purposes. 

In this context, the artists featured in Roving Light present works that expand upon these discourses, opening a dialogue between photography and other mediums such as painting, drawing, print, sculpture, collage, amongst others. The title of the exhibition is derived from the earliest definitions of photography as a medium of light that moves from subject to subject and is freed from established means of image-making. The works featured in the exhibition explore the material qualities of photography, its presence as a physical document, a figment of a memory, a composite of encounters, a documentation of an ongoing process.

Works such as Reuben Brown’s ongoing project Club Construction documents the minutiae and ephemera of LGBTQ+  club culture, reproduced as a series of photos and texts printed on translucent awagami unryu paper, the images overlaying upon one another to create a stratigraphic document of fading and emerging practices. In other instances, the photograph is used as a means of documentation or testimony, such as in the work of Jan McCullough, whose practice explores the physical act of fabrication and DIY, where the photograph acts as a type of mnemonic device that captures the result of an open-ended process, inviting the viewer to explore this visually arresting sculptural language. 

These are just some of the themes and approaches that the artists have taken in their use of photography which is employed as part of their wider methodology. The works in this exhibition seek to create an alternative to our contemporary experience of photography as an endless scroll presented predominantly via digital screen based technology. These works invite the viewer to take a considered and slower approach to viewing the image and to explore each artist’s unique use of this medium as a means of translating what it means to be an experiencing subject in the world today. 

Exhibiting artists: Reuben Brown, Mollie Browne, Gerard Carson, Niamh Clarke, Amanda Coogan, Jonathan Conlon, Joy Gerrard, Karl Hagan, Frederic Huska, Jan McCullough, Meadhbh McIlgorm, Grace McMurray, Jennifer Trouton.

Curated by Gerard Carson