Open Eye Gallery
For over 30 years Open Eye Gallery has been at the cutting edge of contemporary photography and a range of media, including film, video and installation. As part of MADE UP, Nancy Davenport's exhibition at Open Eye Gallery claims that we can never separate fact from fiction. Reality itself is made up; fantasy and illusion should lie at the heart of our quest to understand it.
Reality, it turns out, is obscure, paradoxical, recalcitrant, messy, elusive and troubled. It’s hell-bent on withholding its secrets. This is good news for poets, bad news for revolutionaries. To effect social or political change, we need a shared language, a stable set of tools for describing the world. Without them, how do we know what to do, or how to do it? How do we get anyone else to join in?
Nancy Davenport's exhibition tackles these questions with a sense of play and pathos. Its manifest subject is the phenomenon of 'footprint migration' in the car industry – the shifting of production to new factories in low-cost countries in Eastern Europe and Asia. Davenport gathers materials – sound and pictures – from the factories themselves, and uses them to create installations that at first glance are documentary in character. On closer examination, however, things have a distinctly staged quality. Moving images turn out to be stills, which in turn are broken by flickers of movement. Flights of fancy transport us from factory floor to outer space, or replay the drive to work as a joy-ride. The iconography of social documentary gives way to that of avant-garde art, underground film, science fiction, fantasy.
But we don't get away that easily. Davenport's paradigm is the politically committed avant-garde art of the 1960s and 70s. Its figures and gestures haunt her work, reminding us of what we have lost. One of the exhibition's dominant images is of workers resting in a 'virtual lounge' fixed in place by the institutional spaces they inhabit, and left standing by the motion of a smooth, machine-like tracking shot.
Davenport asks how we can challenge prevailing accounts of reality, how we can act politically when our modes of contestation – rooted in the last century – are exhausted or played out. Her alternative model, as formulated in this exhibition, is tangled, nuanced and open. It mixes direct observation with poetry, fantasy, quotation and reiteration; creates an image of the world in which reality itself is made up, in which unreality is inescapable, but so too is the responsibility that comes with knowledge.
Nancy Davenport's exhibition tackles these questions with a sense of play and pathos. Its manifest subject is the phenomenon of 'footprint migration' in the car industry – the shifting of production to new factories in low-cost countries in Eastern Europe and Asia. Davenport gathers materials – sound and pictures – from the factories themselves, and uses them to create installations that at first glance are documentary in character. On closer examination, however, things have a distinctly staged quality. Moving images turn out to be stills, which in turn are broken by flickers of movement. Flights of fancy transport us from factory floor to outer space, or replay the drive to work as a joy-ride. The iconography of social documentary gives way to that of avant-garde art, underground film, science fiction, fantasy.
But we don't get away that easily. Davenport's paradigm is the politically committed avant-garde art of the 1960s and 70s. Its figures and gestures haunt her work, reminding us of what we have lost. One of the exhibition's dominant images is of workers resting in a 'virtual lounge' fixed in place by the institutional spaces they inhabit, and left standing by the motion of a smooth, machine-like tracking shot.
Davenport asks how we can challenge prevailing accounts of reality, how we can act politically when our modes of contestation – rooted in the last century – are exhausted or played out. Her alternative model, as formulated in this exhibition, is tangled, nuanced and open. It mixes direct observation with poetry, fantasy, quotation and reiteration; creates an image of the world in which reality itself is made up, in which unreality is inescapable, but so too is the responsibility that comes with knowledge.
