Joe Clark: 'what magic' The Landing Strip, Berlin, DE
Image: Joe Clark,what magic (detail) 2015, Fujiflex C type print and magnets, Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK
what magic
The Landing Strip
Allerstraße 18/19 12049 Berlin
12 - 27 September 2015
What is a photograph? With ever-increasing speed, the technical circumstances surrounding its production, as well as its (representational) qualities, are changing. Over the years, the credibility of the photographic image has been gradually eroded, as literally any type of image can now be generated or manipulated in any desired manner. Digital technologies have almost completely taken over the field, and these days, almost every smartphone comes equipped with a fingernail-sized, high-performance camera.
Alongside the advances in technology, access to the medium of photography has also evolved: photography is no longer a skill practiced only by learned professionals; today anyone can use a camera to take photographs. Photos have become digital rather than material objects, and as such require few consumables; they can be produced or displayed at almost any time, anywhere. The social networking service, Instagram, provides a clear example for how the sharing of images has grown into a new form of communication. The photograph is no longer what we talk about, it is the language itself.
Joe Clark's works are photographic. Regardless of medium, be it sculpture, film or photography - in any of its modalities, the artist seeks to capture its „magical" quality, the seemingly lost possibility - of using the photograph as a means to construct truth. Many of his works display an - in the words of the artist - absence of content, because they are, in fact, works about photography itself. what magic as a body of work, can be understood as a sequence of steps - based upon one another yet also standing for themselves. A photograph is an object, is a set of data, is a photograph. And so on. A moment that lasts only a few hundredths of a second, „Whispers down the lane" becomes an almost tangible, manipulable space. Yet each single work is but a step in the development towards the next. Where this leads, and what is actually seen, lie then - as always - in the eye of the beholder.
Workplace Gallery is a contemporary art gallery run by artists.
Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs.