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This year’s International Digital Art Award (IDAA) and The Harries: National Digital Art Prize confirmed one recent trend, and bucked another. In evidence was both the ‘aesthetic turn’ towards more lush imagery in contemporary art, and an emphasis on the still photographic image which defies recent pronouncements about ‘the death of photography’.
The winning Harries entry, Linda Dement’s White Rose, brings these two trends together. A complex photograph showing a delicate creamy bloom with a pink calyx on a moodily dark background, it reveals itself, on closer inspection, to be entangled in sharp wires, and criss-crossed with occasional blood-coloured streaks. The stem of the adjacent dead bud is a rusty nail, and a dirty piece of broken glass hovers above. We realise also that the bloom itself is comprised not of ordinary petals and sepals (small leaves), but rather of ambiguous fleshy lumps which subtly shift its shape from rosette to clump. The pinks become flesh-toned and suddenly it is not a rose any more, but a growth. The subversion of that traditional symbol of chaste romance into a comment on the diseased body is irresistible—and also very beautiful, in a quite traditional, painterly way. Like last year’s winning entry, Blue Plastic, also by Linda Dement, the artistic stimulus of this image is Kathy Acker’s ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, about that woman’s experience with breast cancer. White Rose’s imagery of abnormal, unhealthy growth references not just breast cancer but all the other kinds of rampant, toxic proliferation, recalling the famous caution about capitalism—that the only example of uncontrolled growth in nature is the (other) ‘big C’.
Photography was also the subject of an entire show at... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline