PRESS RELEASE
GARTH KNIGHT – JEWELLED CREATURES
New Photomedia Works
At first glance Garth Knight’s images appear to be creatures laid out for inspection or display – a beetle, a butterfly – carefully placed and lifted from the ground. On closer viewing they are not the actual creature, or a painted image, but imaginary creatures made up of many photographs of existing, real objects. Rings, pendants, earrings, precious and semi-precious cut stones merge and interlink to form the entire image. The details become smaller and more intricate the closer you look, and you find yourself swirling down some rabbit hole of possibilities reminiscent of the endlessly repeated (but never the same) patterns in the veins of a leaf or the chaotic but contained patterns of fractal geometry.
We have all seen familiar shapes in random patterns – faces in peeling paint or animals in the clouds, usually when our minds are wandering and not absorbed with what actually exists in front of us. Similarly, when looking at Knight’s images, once you can see past the overall picture, then down through the level of reality that is the image fragments, you move into the swirling and seemingly endless patterns between them and your grip on what is real begins to loosen and your imagination can take hold.
When exhibiting his last series of work at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, Australia, Robert McFarlane (art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald) said:
“The real revelation of the centre’s exhibition proved to be Garth Knight’s intricately detailed colour images of insects. I found these astonishing in their opalescent detail. Looking closer at Knight’s large, golden image of a spider I found hundreds, perhaps thousands of tiny female faces hidden within the body of the insect.”
Originally Knight was using photographs of human bodies, bound up in rope and photographed from various positions and angles to construct his montages. These images attracted the attention of Parisienne jeweller Lorenz Baumer, and a collaborative effort was started which resulted in a series of works constructed entirely from photographs of jewellery – Jewelled Creatures.
Knight uses the modern tools of digital photography and computer image manipulation to not only cut and paste but to utilise repetition, interconnection, overlaying and merging of detail to offer crystalline new forms to mere fragments. Jewellers and artisans throughout history have been using gold and precious stones to recreate the dazzling beauty of insects and other creatures, from the lapis lazuli encrusted scarab beetles of ancient Egyptian pendants to the gem encrusted dragonflies of the art nouveau brooch. Combined with the tradition of constructed pictures (images that appear to be one thing but upon closer inspection are made of another, such as Arcimboldo’s Seasons portraits) Knight extends this practice into the post modern realm of making objects that appear hyper real but do not actually exist in the material world.
Knight’s art practice has been associated with our interpretation of reality, our place in the universe and how we relate to the infinite and the continuum of the soul. The works in this series continues to explore these questions with archetypal references relating to the creatures constructed – such as Ouroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tail and is a metaphor for rebirth and the infinite, butterflies which are universal symbols of metamorphosis and transformation, and Arachne, the spider that spins the fabric of our physical universe and connects all things. He asks us to question what we see, to look a little further into things and to loosen our hold on preconceived ideas to gain a more intuitive, personal response.
The images from the series Jewelled Creatures, along with several examples of previous works were exhibited until 31st October 2008 at Iconoclastes - Gallery d’Art, 20 rue Danielle Casanova, 75002 Paris.
The same works, along with new works will be exhibited in Australia at Depot II Gallery, 2 Danks Street, Waterloo 15-19th September 2009.
They can also be viewed online at Knight’s website www.garthknight.com
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