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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Exhibition
Louisa Loakes
Verdict: Gothic Rayograms
London - The Muse - 21-25 Sep 04
Louisa Loakes exhibits a set of black and white photograms in the context of a quirky, alluring and slightly disturbing installation.
The photograms are 5 cm square photographic images of dragonflies, the occasional cage, jelly-glasses stuffed with feathers, ferns, glass leech-pots.
The photograms, or more exactly Rayograms after Man Ray, perfecter of the complex technique from around 1922 onwards, are made by a method with origins from the start of photography.
Louisa Loakes smears plywood with a paste she's mixed from rabit-skin glue (gesso) and chalk. It's finished in the dark with Liquid Light, a photo-sensitive white emulsion allowed to set hard. The resulting photographic plate is ready for exposure.
Louisa Loakes uses a photographic enlarger inherited from her grandfather as a single concentrated light source, creating a precise square (5x5 cm) of illumination. The image is formed by laying an object - eg a dragonfly - directly on the plate for an exposure time found by experiment. The plate is developed with normal photographic chemicals and thoroughly washed.
Light makes the plate go black, the longer the exposure, the blacker. Areas in shadow, eg covered by objects, go white, so the result looks like a photographic negative.
The material is slow in photographic terms, so there's time to move objects, and hold them up from the plate - creating different tones and focus effects. 3-d glass objects like the leech-pots and glasses create sharply-focused or diffused images depending on their distance from the plate. Filling them with feathers makes startling, Gothic effects.
The results are shown here as plates mounted on square mahogany frames, sizes from 5 x 5 cm to about 35 x 35 cm. In each case the image is 5 x 5; the larger plates are formed from a matrix of images - creating sequences and assemblies of exposures.
For this exhibition (she has another running concurrently in Betws-y-Coed), Louisa Loakes shows alongside Elizabeth Emanuel. Louisa Loakes is at the front of the gallery, by a large window. It's an eerie experience, as her work has rather more of the night than Michael Howard.
The exhibition space is around 5m x 5m of wall which the artist has painted a dark grey-green, similar in colour to army camouflage. There's a fine old Victorian teak cabinet stuffed with objects from a high-class horror film. The leech-pots (but no leeches), photograms, feathers, lead glasses (most likely for arsenic-infused sherry), photograms made into ghostly drinks coasters, urns, a tin box, and small leather case (probably containing a severed hand).
In front there's a black distressed wooden table, with inkwell, quill and ancient visitor's book with marbled edges. The wall carries the faint projection of a bird's cage. Hanging from the wall there's a torn handbag, open and filled with sycamore helicopters.
As a whole Louisa Loakes's exhibition is artfully assembled as a subtle context for exhibiting the photograms. It's also an intriguing installation in itself, both in the detail of its parts and in the mood the artist creates.
Credits: Artist - Louisa Loakes (Louisa Elizabeth Loakes). Arts Consultant - Alana Pryce. Gallery Director - Damian Rayne.
END
John Park
reviewed Thursday 23 Sep 04 / The Muse
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
