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If the photograph cannot be penetrated, it is because of its evidential power. It is precisely in this arrest of interpretation that the photograph's certainty resides: I exhaust myself realising that this-has-been, an "urdoxa" nothing can undo, unless you prove to me that this image is not a photograph.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980
Jacky Redgate's recent exhibition of installation/photographic works, makes a curious development in her work with the photographic image to date. For in this exhibition Redgate departs from working with the image directly in order to push further her exploration of the interstitial, fissured levels of pictorial and textual operations. Where in previous works such as Taming The Spectrum and Work to Rule, Redgate sought to locate in the image itself that which the photograph loses or exhausts with the plenitude of its objectivity. In the exhibition Untitled, 1989, the photograph itself becomes the lost object.
This is an exhibition about what exceeds and exists on the margins of photographic technologies; with the exception of two cibachrome images, the photograph is an absent presence.
By using installation work, paint on canvas and various hybrid forms Redgate restages and so complicates old questions about authenticity, 'art', illusion and mimesis. Ultimately the viewer is forced to rethink the givenness of the photographic image as the intimate connections between photographic traditions and the resistant forms and processes of Untitled,1989, become apparent.
The viewers first encounter, Hungry Birds, is a characteristically disarming work. It is a large sheet of suspended safety glass on which Redgate has copied in enamel paint an image from a 19th Century illustrated almanac. The work has been centrally positioned however to display