Still now is then forever by Andy Broadey

16.04.2019

Still now is then forever

Andy Broadey | Frances Richardson

 

Artists Talk was on: 24/02/15 4-5 pm


The series of photographs entitled Still is a palimpsest that, according to Andy Broadey, uses the photographic documentation to exhibit “the sedimentation of historical form”. Photography here works as an artistic take on the psychoanalytic “mystic writing pad” of Sigmund Freud, an apparatus that aims to visualise the always already fragmented recalling and re-reading of the historical past.

Vis-á-vis the work Still, Frances Richardson installs her Now is then forever, which consists of “simulated” cracks in the new gallery’s windows. This stylised drawing, once installed, prompts an examination of certain complex clandestine ethical and ideological implications of “haunting of forgetting with and by remembering” (Gil Anidjar). The obstructed window-views and the “staged” deterioration emphasise the fragile cognitive capacity of human vision for grasping both the past and the future, while the work puts in a complex and slightly ironic co-relation to the materiality of “now” and the imaginary of “forever”.

Therefore while the work Still offers a complex socio-political and cultural context, the work Now is then forever offers the mnemonic metaphoric frame; while Still deals with representation of ideology, Now is then forever is almost iconoclastic; however both works reflect on the incapability of the present to encompass the past, the impossibility of representation to “restore” the cracks in the matter and memory and the anticipation of the “cracks”, or gaps, in the utopian vision of future.

[Text extract from exhibition pamphlet, written by theorist and curator, Suzana Milevska]
Hanover Project, Hanover Building, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE