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| (Installation View, Image Acquisition Methods) |
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| (Installation View, Image Acquisition Methods) |
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| (Installation View, Image Acquisition Methods) |
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| (I.A.M.2.c, 2013) |
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| (I.A.M.1.a, 2013) |
In the fields of medical imaging and digital imaging, image acquisition refers to the collection of data required to form an image, and image reconstruction refers to processing the data to create images.
Tomas Downes practice comprises sculpture, photography, assemblage and an interest in display systems, each of which are utilized to examine his overarching concern with the act of image construction. In the current exhibition, Image Acquisition Methods, at Limoncello in London, Tomas has built a display system of large dark canvases supported by pairs of vertical bars fixed to the floor and overhead beams. The supporting bars allow Tomas' painting-like objects to activate both horizontal and vertical space, freeing the images from the wall and exposing the back of the stretched canvas. Each canvas displays an image: a found image which is re-photographed or constructed through assemblage, documented and then processed (printed onto steel or aluminium and often layered beneath tinted Perspex filters) creating layer upon layer of removal or obscurity from the starting point. The exhibition has a steely quality: a clinical, ordered and systematic feeling. The dark boards and the grayed images appear like x-rays, glass microscope slides, or printing plates upon which the acquired image is partly revealed and partly concealed.
"A new sense of the image as picture" Hal Foster writes in Art Since 1900 (please forgive me the lengthy quote) "emerged around about the time of Douglas Crimp's 1977 show at Metro Pictures which included Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Phillip Smith and Sherrie Levine. These artists were linked by this idea of the image as "picture" – that is, a palimpsest of representations, often found or "appropriated," rarely original or unique, that complicated, even contradicted, the claims of authorship and authenticity so important to most modern aesthetics. "We are not in search of source origins" Crimp wrote, "but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture." "Picture" was meant to transcend any given medium, delivering its message equally form the pages of magazines, books, billboards, and all other forms of mass culture. Further, it mocked the idea that a specific medium might itself serve as an aesthetic origin in the modernist sense, whether by "truth to materials" or as revealed essence. "Pictures" have no specific medium, they are as transparent as beams of light, as flimsy as decals meant to dissolve in water."
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| Sherrie Levine from the series, Untitled, After Edward Weston, 1980 |
