9/2/2006
Dan Hays
Platform3, London
The exhibition Twilight in the Wilderness is the latest manifestation of what Hays has collectively called the Colorado Impressions project, begun in 2000. Through his painted studies of these borrowed lowresolution digital images and his adherence to the grid of their manufacture, the artist makes links with the history of painting's continual struggle with mimeticism in general and landscape painting in particular.
Twilight in the Wilderness
The exhibition Twilight in the Wilderness is the latest manifestation of
what Dan Hays has collectively called the Colorado Impressions project,
begun in 2000. Hays found this other Dan Hays by chance when, out of curiosity, he entered his name
into a search engine. At the top of the list was a Dan Hays who lives in the
Rocky Mountains in the USA. His website consisted of numerous photographs,
including an extensive gallery of images of the landscape surrounding his
house. Hays contacted his double by email and asked permission to use some
of these images as the basis for the work which formed the beginning of the
Colorado Impressions project.
The images that interested the artist were very low-resolution video stills,
which had been digitally compressed to speed up download times. Their
composition was due in part to chance as they had been taken from a panning
video camera and in part by selection as they had been chosen from amongst
the thousands of frames. Hays was drawn to their peculiar distortions of
colour and form. The images are made up of grids within grids a phenomena
known as blocking artefacts which is seen as undesirable by image
compression software developers and amateur digital photographers alike. It
exposes the mechanics of the construction of the digital picture.
Rosalind Krauss has written eloquently on the grid; "In the spatial sense,
the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized,
ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like
when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from its
coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the
real and replacing them with the lateral result not of imitation, but of
aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the
grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order
particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown
by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to
be both prior and final. The grid declares the space of art to be at once
autonomous and autotelic."
From: Rosalind Krauss: "Grids" October 9, Summer 1979. [Reprinted in: The
Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1985, pp. 9-22.
Through his painted studies of these borrowed lowresolution digital images
and his adherence to the grid of their manufacture, the artist makes links
with the history of painting's continual struggle with mimeticism in general
and landscape painting in particular. Dan has said "The ubiquity of
disposable or expendable images, this super abundance of imagery runs
counter to the tradition of the singular and hard won representations of
wilderness in the history of painting."
This history is one that initially grappled with mimeticism and embraced it.
It also includes the Impressionists observance of incessant variation and
use of rapid and denatured mechanic to create their images to the modernist
rejection of art as re-presentation of the real to post-modern evacuation of
meaning and makers hand. Strangely enough though, some how, Hays's work
underlines this history as one of true romance (perhaps of the love hate
variety). There is a passion that drives his machinic endeavors to
transcribe these throw away images. Hays says; "The terrible irony is that
my paintings take hundreds of laborious hours to render. It is in a spirit
of redemption for 'low' and expendable images that I toil as a painter,
spending perhaps four months rendering in oils a 60k image that is
transmitted over the web in a fraction of a second. Only half-jokingly, I
have considered my practice as a painter to being like a very slow and low
quality computer printer.
Patrick Ireland has written of the grid in 1988; "It's supposed to be
indexical of all that is rational, but I think it's as mad as many logical
things turn out to be artificial, hysterical, subsuming its own version of
chaos. It's rigid but flexible, a measure of scale but scaleless, it's flat
with imitations of depth, democratic about space but really absolutist,
stamped with rigidity but alert with permutational virtuosity. It's a
container that contains itself, that is both form and content."
Hays's Colorado Impressions paintings become symbols representing a
seemingly limitless set of possibilities, while paradoxically emphasizing
the finite constructability of each element and of the sequence of all
elements. They convey a romantic attachment to experience of place through
many representational filters. The painter and subject are in a
relationship, one of a possessive kind of love romantic attachment.
Hays; "Colorado chose me by chance... My devotion to it as a subject gave
rise to a sense of ownership or colonization that is mutual. This love is,
necessarily, unrequited. The act of physically going to the real Colorado
would dispel the reverie of what has become a mythic place, the land of
color, inhabited by an alternative Dan Hays. Other happy accidents, like the
fact that the state is roughly a 4 x 3 rectangle, the same proportions as a
video screen and all my paintings of the place simply reaffirms these
romantic delusions."
This is Dan Hays's first exhibition in London since 2002. The paintings in
Twilight in the Wilderness will feature in a touring exhibition and
catalogue, Impressions of Colorado, organised by Southampton City Gallery,
funded by the Arts Council and National Lottery. Venues include; Manchester
Art Gallery, Southampton City Gallery and Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham. Hays
has exhibited in solo shows throughout the UK and Europe as well as group
exhibitions internationally. He has work in the Tate, Arts Council, Walker
Art Gallery, Royal bank of Scotland and Saatchi collections.
Private View: Friday 10 February, 6.00-8.00 pm
Platform3
Wilkes Street - London
The gallery is open Thursday - Sunday 12 - 6pm or by appointment.