Eye See

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When Elias Canetti said that “everything becomes faster so that there would be more time. But there is always less and less time,”  he touched a nerve ending of a culture fearful of its possible termination.

The most recent work of John Stezaker reflects a sensation informed by the threat of loss. Each and every image produced reflects possible disintegration back into an undifferentiated blackness from which they emerged. The white silkscreen images appear to balance on an edge of becoming and disappearing, frozen moments illuminated by a flash of light. There is a little before us that records an attachment to the here and now of the world despite the appropriated a region of the images. Culled from old manuels classifying wildlife, photo-roman magazines, trade catalogues, out-of-date medical textbooks and children's encyclopaedias, these images are themselves at the threshold of being lost. An image of a stuffed vulture that is now extinct seems especially pivotal in creating a co-existence space of the real and imaginary, something that lives on only as image.

Technology has made the world ever more immediate and “press button”, the speed of things and turn erasing both distance and memory. It is possible to speculate that the blackness that Stezaker presents is only possible in a technologically saturated world where image pulses appear, collide and disappear with a momentary flick of an eye. Much more apparent though is the illusion that blackness holds to the space of romanticism; the night, death and otherness, phenomenally the black indicates a space of suspension, or floating worlds that invite one to partake in reverie.