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| Event: | Christopher Bucklow - A Riflemaker Exhibition |
| Venue: |
Riflemaker Gallery, Soho, London |
| Date: | Thursday 18th May 2006 |
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Bucklow's photographs create the impression of presences that seem both three-dimensional and immaterial; more like auras than physical objects. I am reminded of photographs taken a century ago featuring see-through presences that purported to be wraths or spirits.
Bucklow doesn't make any such claims: but the fact that the head is usually the lightest part of the image suggests that he is trying to portray something other than the body – intelligence, awareness, the spirit; call it what you will.
Christopher Bucklow's long running series of Guest photographs attempt to capture what is ephemeral, transient, and other in the human form. As if tapping into some latent strata of bodily energy – a field of pure potential that manifests itself in brilliant light - Bucklow orchestrates an illuminating overcoming of photography's traditional depiction of the human form.
In order to create images of such profound existential clarity, Bucklow has perfected his own unique system of photographic generation. The images, which are edition-unique and unrepeatable, are formed using natural sunlight in a technique adapted from pinhole photography.
Bucklow achieves a variation in the different works depending on the intensity of the sunlight, the time of day and the speed at which the pinholes in the camera are exposed to the light The vital luminescence of these portrait images relates the inspiration behind their status as figures of the passive psyche.
In Bucklow's work, the unconsciousness appears as a near omnipotent realm that despite appearing to be virtual actually has the contingent capacity for concrete impaction upon the reality of everyday consciousness. This is reflected in the fact that Bucklow sacrifices any conscious selection of his subject; rather each figure featured in the series is instead a visual actualisation of a human apparition within a significant dream – be it during day or night – Bucklow has experienced.
While being figurative of individual people in his life who appear to him during dreams, the Guest images for Bucklow also represent something akin to a strange human essence locatable within a greater collective unconscious. We are in the presence, therefore, of both individual personalities and of character archetypes eternal psycho-general templates we either wear as identities ourselves or which we can see and experience in others.
The full group of works that comprise this exhibition at Riflemaker is thus a collection of portraits that extends way beyond the confines of the figurative representation of individuals. Bucklow's images ultimately relate to the idea of the artist, the subject and viewer as enmeshed under the conditions of a collective psycho-spirit particular to humanity itself as an ongoing temporal, historical and intellectual extension vitally conditioned by both conscious and unconscious forces. |
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