Danielle Tooley | Mirror Image
2 March – 1 April 2017
To paint the photograph is to negate the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs an authority of the objective. When photography is relieved of its position as the ‘necessarily real,’ so too does its fixed position as ‘past’ become disarticulated. In a painting of a photograph, there is coalescence between the ‘pastness’ of the photograph, and the continuing present of the observer, opening up a space in which time and memory can be generated by the image rather than documented by it.
Working to reveal not what is novel in photography, but the strangeness of what we consider familiar, the works presented in Mirror-Image can be seen as an instances of instability that open up interpretative possibilities. Oscillating between modes of abstraction and representation, between painting and photography, between form and content, the world of the painting can no longer be relegated to a position of the past to be recalled or forgotten, but instead constructs new relations between pasts in general, various actual presents, and virtual futures.
