A. M. Hanson - A Distant, Darkened Lobby

About

Hanson's practice focuses on the relationship between photography, performance and creative production. His early action photographs portray Leigh Bowery, Alexander McQueen and others at crucial moments in social and performative situations, with subsequent work disrupting the idea of the photographer as passive 'witness', through the creation of a set of 'photo-related' characters, one called Susan Tripod. His most recent work, initiated after a return to study at UCA in Canterbury, explores how photography might in itself 'perform', creating new sites of activity by re-framing and interpolating fragments of the world.

This current body of work spotlights the permeability of the 'real' in the information age, operating in a realm where solid objects can be thought of as projections of lifestyle fantasies, and images, whether on screen or in print, can provide an entire work or leisure environment. A Distant, Darkened Lobby takes this idea a step further, playfully proposing metropolitan offices to be fantasy-sites of creative production, and LIMBO's project space to be a hardcopy version of these corporate utopias / dystopias. Hanson has spent the last year staking-out offices and related spaces in order to "re-imagine new uses for the vast emptinesses, and to illuminate the montaged blend of structures and objects that remain, when everyone has left the buildings". In the exhibition, the photographs, principally liberated from standard modes of display, are overlaid, suspended and attached to various items of office furniture, becoming metaphors for the tools and activities of the artist's studio ' from paint-mixing to life-drawing to photo apps.

The exhibition features two short films, set to the music of Dale Cornish, who also features in one in the guise of an office voyeur turned atelier-based maker.

http://www.alexcalledsimonprojects.com/