Points of Departure

30 June – 23 July 2011

A point of departure is a starting point, the point where things begin to become something else. The point of departure implies a passage will follow, through both time and space, but more importantly a passage of change.

The imaginative process is one of distortion. To take an object for what it is requires only recognition. But to take that same object and transform it into something new demands the deconstruction of that object. As Bachelard states in his essay The poetry of air, “we always think of the imagination as a faculty that forms images, on the contrary, it deforms what we perceive: it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them… if the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent then there is no imagination.”

Our memories too are distortions of past events, filtered by our perception, our assumptions, our point of view, filtered by time and state of mind. Each time we call on a memory we do, in fact, re-construct the event. We could therefore say that remembering is in fact a form of creating.

The process employed in all the works in this show is to begin with a solid point and to strip it of its context, transform its structure and then present it as an abstraction of its former self. All the works in Points of Departure imply voyage of some sort, be that actual travel, mental abstraction, nostalgic reverie, thematic evolution or imaginative flëneurie.

Within each work we witness light in passage. Through the simple device of projecting through various containers holding transparent mediums the concern is focused on light in the process of displacement as opposed to light falling upon a surface.

Light travels in straight lines. When moving between mediums of differing densities it can change direction and speed. It will also slow down, even if only by the slightest amount. Therefore we could say that every time we look at the world through glass we are in fact seeing the past.