Ayesha’s Child
The relationship between photography and painting has a long history. The reproducible image, once seen as the poor cousin of fine art painting, has become increasingly seductive for artists because of its psycho-conceptual dimension. Photography infects the contemporary world like a virus and infiltrates all the arts. It speaks loudly about memory, time and identity. It compels us with its freeze-framed moments which capture life at the same time as they kill it. The life/death paradox of photography is compelling for the viewer and the collector, whether professional or amateur. It is what makes the photograph a fetish because it acts as a kind of memento, reminding us where we have been and who we once were.
Cherry Hood engages with photography because of the rich psychological presence that it conjures for the viewer. Her monumental billboard sized paintings of the human face are composite images of real people and found photographs, there are no identifiable people here and yet every face seems to demand its own place in memory and time.
The artist renders each face in watercolour paint. Initially the image is worked up on a horizontal surface so that it stains the membrane of the canvas. Later in the process the painting is put on its vertical axis so that the watery paint begins to run down and through the face, creating an ethereal affect. The physical qualities of the paint give a kind of transparency to the image as if it were a spectre. All of the faces are young and androgynous. Seen in exhibition on the gallery wall they create a tribe in a moment of becoming. They could be threatening or seductive, they could be powerful or erotic, depending on the cultural baggage of the viewer.
On some levels this is dangerous art because in depicts young people and contemporary viewers often experience a sense of moral panic when ‘the child’ becomes the object of the gaze. But Cherry Hood’s youths are not passive objects, they are subjects that have been made, created by the artist, to punctuate and challenge conventional stereotypes. They are latent identities that appear to speak loudly and confidently. They behold the viewer and many of them return the gaze. But they are not actually there; they are conceptual phantoms that already haunt the cultural imaginary. Like so many lost children who will never been found.
Photography is used conceptually in the construction of these images. The paintings do what photographs do. They present the lingering of the subject on the surface of the material medium. The surface becomes a kind of second skin through which the subjects pictured obtain a ghostly identity. But identity itself is elided; it slips away from the viewer and from the subject. It is both illusive and performative. This could be a hall of fame or an archive of missing persons. There is a mourning quality to the work both in the haunting figures and in the texture of the paint which runs down the surface like transparent tears.
Anne Marsh |
