David Osbaldeston: Out of Time (The Light of Day / The Action of the Play)

About

Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present a solo show of new work by David Osbaldeston, Out of Time (The Light of Day / The Action of the Play). Through manipulated images of news photography and a print series of interpretive book cover designs wrapping the gallery exterior from Luigi Pirandello's celebrated play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the exhibition will explore relationships between the gallery and theatre staging, displacement, reality, illusion and social discord. The journalistic images are taken from photographic records made between the 1970's and 1990's of protests or accidents that report a breakdown of social and economic order such as the LA Riots, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Waco Siege, the Piper Alpha disaster and the Highway of Death. Re-photographed, appropriated and re-presented by Osbaldeston with textual snippets, amplified in scale and printed on 1980s Ilford photographic paper, the works' draw attention, both physically and psychologically, to the constructed nature of the photographic image. Pirandello's play describes an interrupted rehearsal in which the participating actors become displaced by a number of characters to a prescribed story for which their life has been previously written. What unfolds neatly articulates the existential relationship between art, life and the reconstruction of events. Through exploring the space between factual and fictional forms, Osbaldeston draws attention to the circumstances in re-constructing reality and the suspension of disbelief. Osbaldeston's prints similarly aim to re-focus the inevitability of how design may become integrated into our understanding of time and memory. The exhibition becomes a place where both codes of presentation become part of the same exploration; to what extent does presentation become integral to the production of meaning once the event has slipped beyond the impact of its context and into the realm of historic information?