Rick Giles
dal 18/10/2010 al 19/11/2010
Segnalato da
18/10/2010
Rick Giles
Eleven Fine Art, London
On show new works by British photographer Giles. The exhibition encapsulates the relationship between man and nature. It documents the photographer's engagement to the place he has chosen to live in and his progressive domestication on the land.
Eleven is delighted to present Unearthed, an exhibition of new works by US-based British photographer Rick Giles. Like his series Light previously shown at the gallery, Unearthed encapsulates the relationship between man and nature. It documents the photographer’s engagement to the place he has chosen to live in and his progressive domestication on the land.
Giles lives in Connecticut, in what was once the first organic farm in the United States. Whilst working the land over the past couple of years, the artist has dug up objects left behind by the numerous generations which occupied the farm before him. The objects range from the obvious, tools and other farming implements, to the absurd, like a buoy or an enormous plastic dinosaur. Each find reveals some of this territory’s past; it’s a domestic, often intimate story of hard work but also of kids playing around the building, abandoning the toys that are now recovered.
The years spent buried gave to these very mundane objects an archaeological quality; they become artefacts testifying for a now defunct world. They are marked, damaged, transformed. It’s as if earth had already started to consume, and destroy them, absorbing in its deep darkness the man-made like the natural. Occasionally the remains of the animals that used to be kept there emerged. The skulls and bones of ancient herds come back to haunt the photographic series.
While working on the project, the photographer found forty glass panels. These were to play a crucial role in this work, as Giles later decided to shoot each object behind these blurry panels. This simple process adds a distance between the object and viewer. It functions as a physical manifestation of time; the artefacts seem to have been photographed through the earth from which they come from.
Rick Giles was born in England in 1969 and now lives in New Milford, Connecticut. Unearthed will be his third solo exhibition at Eleven. Earlier this year he exhibited at The Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong. His work has been shown at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2008 and at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
The private view is supported by Ruinart champagne.
Image details: Rick Giles, Godzilla, 2010
C print, 30 x 24 in / 76 x 61 cm, Edition of 3
For further information on Rick Giles’ work or forthcoming exhibitions at Eleven please contact Susannah Haworth on 020 7823 5540 or on susannah@elevenfineart.com
Opening Tuesday 19th October 2010, 6 to 8pm
Eleven
11 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LX, England
Free admission