
Solid State: Reflections on the real
29 September – 4 November 2001
Solid State was an exhibition which reflected upon our grasp of the real. Through film, photography, painting, and sculpture it explored the dialogue between subject and media in the quest for reality. Paradoxically, the more we attempt to define the real the more illusory and elusive it becomes.
The exhibition was curated by Jane Dixon, a previous Kettle’s Yard and Murray Edwards Artist Fellow. Her own new paintings of warplane imagery appropriate the photographic technique of using coloured filters to play on the ambiguity between space and objects.
Joining her were four contemporary artists and the Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo. John Smith’s film Black Tower had us doubting our own perception and memory as a mysterious black tower appears and disappears on an urban journey. A photogram by Cornelia Parker turned the striking of a match into a permanent trace. The foregrounds of Helen Sear’s landscape photographs suddenly revealed themselves to be animal fur. And David Cheeseman literally deconstructed and reconstructed a complete living room.
Alongside the artists’ work are some of the earliest, 19th century photographic experiments with light-sensitive materials, plus contemporary body scans and infra-red aerial photography.
Instead of a unified and coherent image of the world, we were confronted with a series of partial views. What emerged was a compound notion of truth.