Exhibitions 2000-2001
January 4 — February 3, 2001
The Underwater Pinhole Photography Project
Donald Lawrence
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| Feeding Sea Anemone and Starfish, (detail of diptych), 1998 gelatin silver print |
Like many of the others working in the pinhole format, Donald Lawrence focuses as much on process as image, perhaps more, given his elaborately constructed cameras. In a culture which privileges vision over every other sense, we have become habituated to the notion that experience is visual first, conceptual, physical, and sensory only second. Looking around the gallery installation of The Underwater Pinhole Photography Project however, we are struck by the predominance of activity, conceptualization, and a system of production in which the photographer is present at every stage. Seduced by the luminous soft-focus photographs, we delight in these aquarium-like views of the seabed. Notwithstanding, our attention is soon divided by various objects placed around the gallery in a museological arrangement: odd metal boxes fitted with pipes, bolts, and ropes, "reminiscent of a 19th-century diving bell helmet."2 There is one in particular, covered in barnacles and encased in a glass display which brings to mind shipwrecks and sunken treasures. Most surprising is a heavily-laden river kayak. Drawn to it, we are struck by its odd assortment of appendages. It is at the same time suggestive of an obsessive mastery and utter dysfunction, so absurdly encumbered by its own ambitious design that we doubt its ability to even float. How quickly we grasp the relationships between objects and images may vary with our experience, but eventually it becomes clear: the kayak is outfitted with a darkroom, the metallic constructions placed around the gallery are pinhole cameras (which are lowered over the kayak’s side like submarine diving bells), and the photographs are the treasures retrieved with this highly inventive (low) technology.
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Installation
view w/ Kayak Darkroom , 1998 fibreglass and aluminium, with
miscellaneous mfittings and apparatus
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