This exhibition is to display some of the artworks completed so far as part of a Master of Philosophy (Fine Art) research. The photographs are printed on 3 different materials, glass mirrors, cotton and photographic paper. The exhibition will help understand how the works live in a gallery space and how the audience experiences the work. This series explores the importance of experiencing photographic objects and how they live within space, specifically gallery space. The photographs explore the illusion inherent in photography through their embodied relationship with the material they are printed on. The amount of information that a person can retrieve from a photograph is greatly increased by its material form. The material itself gives meaning to the image and contextualises it. Photographs are inherently illusionary by the way they record light and thus, the experience of a photographic object is based in the idea of photographs being an exact recording of a point in time when in reality they can only depict a skewed version of what they seem to depict. Across the work, there is an underlying idea about the inherent illusion in photographs. Photographs only tell half-truths, and because they seem to mimic reality it's often believed that they display truth. Yet, they can only display what the photographer has decided to frame, so they cannot convey to an audience anything but the vision of the photographer, which is an illusion that mimics reality. This inherent illusion in photographs is conveyed in my work through a number of ways, such as framing, using mirrors, lighting and printing on materials alternate to photographic paper. The other aspect of the work is the relationship the image has with the material it is printed on. This relationship is important to the reading of the photograph as the material represents the intent of the photograph just as much as the image does. Without the material aspects of a photograph it is hard for a viewer to conceive the majority of the meanings attached to the photograph.

Bio:

James Rhodes is an emerging artist based in Newcastle. He graduated with first class honours from the University of Newcastle in 2015 and is currently completing his MPhil (Fine Art). He is also part of the Youth Reference Group at Newcastle Art Gallery that helps inform the galleries programming decisions. He works primarily in photography and Rhodes creates conceptual work that explore concepts of photography through photographs. This includes the inherent illusion of photography, reflection, the photographs materiality and how photographic objects explore space when installed. The life of this exhibition will be documented and become part of Rhodes' Masters research, and feature in a paper that is being presented at ‘The Arts in Society Research Network’ conference at the Emily Carr University of Arts + Design in Vancouver, Canada in June 2018.