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PRESS RELEASE:

Sticky Together includes photographs in qualities of transparency, opaqueness and iridescence. Central in the room, a circle radiates long strands of metallic sticky tape, string and wire out to architectural points in the gallery; it’s web-like structure seemingly catching and suspending fragmented matter and imagery, including human hair and urban flowers. From floor to ceiling further material and imagery of balloons, glaciers, oil spills, lily pads and the surface of Mars is seen in the installation as a spatial collage, seen in dual aspect, inviting close and traversing examination from the viewer. This motion of the viewer actives the shimmering, reflective qualities dispersed throughout the installation, creating a flux between stillness and motion.

Sticky Together presents an ambiguous, lively and sensorial space with forms full of nuances and oddities, engendering both dream-like reveries and slippery meanings we bring and find to and in environments.

This installation belongs to Hughes’ wider practice, in which Hughes describes her process as wilding photographs; “going beyond the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.” (Halberstam 2013) This process returns the photograph to a physical condition and mutable image, sitting between matter and mediums, the photograph is seen in a turbulent state of confusion and instability, both fixed and not. This turbulence reveals an important ambiguity; it reorders perception before representation, returning the photograph to the experiential realm. This rupture collapses the dividing line of image to the sensuous world, encompassing the body, showing the potential to form multiplicities of new and unique situations. These affective and turbulent qualities manifest in the photograph as a threshold, a threshold to the Other, to dialogue, to performance, to unforeseen imaginative narratives, gesture and material matter. It shows its state as crucially undone, continually merging and emerging, challenging the narrow conception of photographic images as ubiquitous, immaterial representations.

View by appointment - info@jakobkroon.org