Unearthed

About

Eleven is delighted to present Unearthed, an exhibition of new works by US-based British photographer Rick Giles. Like his series Light previously shown at the gallery, Unearthed encapsulates the relationship between man and nature. It documents the photographer's engagement to the place he has chosen to live in and his progressive domestication the land. Giles lives in Connecticut, in what was once the first organic farm in the United States. Over the last few years, he has been excavating around his barn, digging out the objects left behind by the numerous generations which occupied the farm before him. The objects range from the obvious, tools and other farming implements, to the absurd, like a buoy or an enormous plastic dinosaur. Each find reveals some of this territory's past; it's a domestic, often intimate story of hard work but also of kids playing around the building, abandoning the toys that are now recovered. The years spent buried gave to these very mundane objects an archeological quality, they become artifacts testifying for a now defunct world. They are marked, damaged, transformed. It's as if earth had already started to consume, and destroy them, absorbing in its deep darkness the man-made like the natural. Occasionally the remains of the animals that used to be kept there emerged. The skulls and bones of ancient herds come back to haunt the photographic series. While working on the project, the photographer found forty glass panels. These were to play a crucial role in this work, as Giles later decided to shoot each object behind these blurry panels. This simple process adds a distance between the object and viewer. It functions as a physical manifestation of time, the artifacts seem to have been photographed through the earth from which they come from.