Author: Anna Sophie Clegg

I am currently working on a small book/publication, which displays every image of a landscape I’ve ever taken on my current phone (which I’ve had for around 4 years) paired with an image found on Flickr and taken on the same day, up to 2400 miles away from where I took my photo. The distance between the two photos is determined by the time of day when I took the photo in question, e.g. if it was taken at 16:23, the secondary image would have to be taken somewhere along the perimeter of a 1623 mile radius of the original photo’s location. This factor is a way in which I’ve tried to curb the level of control over the process, leaving the product up to a chance photographer in a chance location, generated by a number I unintentionally “chose” when I took the photo.
The idea is that when paired physically in a book, we may start to form connections between the two scenes that aren’t there. There have been a few occasions where the images have slight aesthetic similarities; formal coincidences. Even though I know that these don’t mean anything and are completely accidental, it’s hard not to believe that it’s a conscious choice, to romanticise it, to feel an connection (if unrequited) to the photographer on the other end of whatever-mile radius I typed into Google maps. Simultaneously, by pairing my own pictures with those of strangers, it’s dampened my own deeply personal connections to the often ambiguous and probably cheesy landscapes and sunsets stored in my phone. For me, they unlock whole days’ worth of memories surrounding them and I can usually remember which date and which exact location they were taken on, even if they’re years old. Archiving dates and events mentally  is something I’ve always done instinctually and to a useless degree, and photos on my camera roll are an important part of solidifying that process. It’s therefore quite an uncomfortable experience when they’re stripped back down to the level of personal attachment that I feel towards photos of unknown places taken by unknown people.
Going through the highly repetitive system of inputting dates, distances and locations into a system and relying completely on chance for an outcome soon became incredibly tedious. However, I feel there’s something important about having a system and sticking to it, even if it results in a poor outcome. There are of course a number of artists who have already made art through obsessively rigorous systems that they devise for themselves and then stick to, such as John Cage’s sound pieces reliant on the audience, Dieter Roth and his piece ‘Flat Waste’, Donald Judd and his Fibonacci-related works, and other artists who adopted the Minimalist approach of not making decisions based on taste but instead reliant on an external, non-negational factor.

So far I have 218 items, making approximately 168 pairings. I have added more every day since I started the project.

Using footage from when I sat in Burgess Park for 3 hours one morning as part of our Practice Workshop along with the wonders of iMovie, I put together a super simple test shot of a possible moving image technique I want to explore further. This has been inspired by the work of both recent Slade Graduate Luke Clayton-Thompson, and film-maker Joachim Koester, who made a film about a Polish opera director who made his actors go through training exercises in remote rural locations, with no audience. The idea of performing to a landscape is very interesting to me, and something I feel could tie in with the wrestling element of my work at the moment.

j

These were the first two paintings I made in my new studio space. As a parallel to looking at simultaneity, I’m interested in the formality and aesthetics of sporting violence, and how I can attempt to make it something ‘beautiful’ through removing the sense of fast motion and context attached to it. Again, this is something I have never experienced myself and can’t directly relate to, yet find extremely interesting. At the moment for the figures I’m using second-hand imagery from the internet and whilst I like the lack of control it gives me, the freedom of painting from a pixelated film still, it’s something that I feel inherently guilty about. I’m trying to figure out conceptually whether continuing to use secondary imagery is acceptable, and if I did use first hand material, whether it would just be for the sake of being able to say yes I filmed/shot it myself.

The handling of the paint itself is also something that I’ve been trying to push with these paintings, although I feel that they still look quite tame. I think I have a tendency to panic and work paint into a surface until it doesn’t look like paint anymore. Whilst this works sometimes, the result is a very naturalistic image, something quite safe. I’m working on letting brush marks stay as they are when they’re first applied, keeping colours block and trying to achieve a graphic quality alongside the more naturalistic elements of the work. This stylistic progression may not be as important as the thought behind the image or involved with the progression of painting as a practice within the post-medium condition (something I’m interested to be self-critical of) but it nonetheless feels necessary somehow in pulling my thoughts together.

Over the past year or so, I have begun to look at the notion of the simultaneous; of time and coincidence, and how we as humans perceive it. Through my work I’m trying to figure out why I feel moved emotionally by things that have nothing to do with me and that weren’t made for me.  Although I of course understand it, I find it difficult to fully comprehend that anything outside my direct phaneron is existing simultaneously to me.  Places I’ve visited once before but have never returned to, people I’ve made darting eye contact on the street and people I didn’t notice at all, they all played the fleeting roles of secondary characters and scenes in my own motion picture yet continue to act out their own, which is of course just as complex and fragile as mine could ever be.
This was what my work was initially looking at: trying to monumentalise fleeting contacts with other people living in London through recording and painting them, taking the time to reconstruct their image in an effort to prolong their existence within my own experience. I have since however moved on to look at people and places to which I have no connection at all. I feel like studying people who I have actually had contact with is maybe self-indulgent, trying to take an idea that everyone must have had at some point whilst on the tube further than it needs to go. I want to start looking at experiences that could never overlap with my own due to geography and other factors, yet are linked by the fact that they’re happening at the same time, somewhere on the same planet. I’m not sure yet how to turn this question into something tangible, but am so far looking at painting, video and photography.

Artists and works who have dealt with similar topics include Layla Curtis, whose year-long project entitled ‘Antipodes’ (1) consisted of pairings of webcams showing footage from two directly opposite points on the earth. There’s something really beautiful about the work, about how unknowing (yet often aesthetically similar) each landscape is of its pairing.
A similar use of the simultaneous can be found in the last few minutes of John Smith’s famous 1976 film ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ (2), where he simply replaces the noisy audio from the street scene in the beginning of the film with that of the field he reveals to us that he’s standing in. This simple, almost too obvious juxtaposition of sound and image creates an unexpectedly unsettling viewing experience.

(1) Layla Curtis, Antipodes, 2013-2014
http://www.antipodes.uk.com

(2) The Girl Chewing Gum, Dir. Smith, J., 1976
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/smith-the-girl-chewing-gum-t13237