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Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture.
Sherrie Levine
The preceding quote from Levine neatly situated the text and by implication the works of Susan Fereday, within a very specific discourse on the nature of representation; one concerned with the contextual signification of the reproductive process and its efficaciousness as a mode of critique. But perhaps this approach is limning. Certainly Fereday's recent exhibition, Value, is firmly grounded in this tradition and her aims are in accord with it, however to slickly pin these images down as such seems not to acknowledge their essential polyvalence. For in reducing them to easily perceivable signifiers of critique we deny their subversive slipperiness; at the very moment we seem ready to categorise them as exclusively deconstructive we are jerked back into polymorphic freefall by the sheer symbolic fluidity of the images themselves.
Nevertheless, the context of these photographs within an exhibition that sets out to examine "the currency of aura in contemporary art ... and the political nature of aesthetics"1, makes it difficult to ignore their deconstructive intent. In fact, there is a fascinating tension between these images' explicitly referential origins (in John Berger's seminal Ways of Seeing television series) and the deliberate ambiguity of the forms. Mediated almost to the point of 'abstract' self-signification, half glimpsed and residual references remain trapped within the dual phosphorescences of pixel-grid and emulsion. The tense relationship between Fereday's products and their source stretches the iconic signifier/signified relationship inherent