Infrastructures

About

The exhibition Infrastructures brings together works by artists Fergus Heron and Sachiyo Nishimura. The practices of both artists imagine and reconstruct relationships between urban landscape and seascape through photography in connected and distinct ways. The Thames side location of Anise Gallery in an area of London once central to the logistics of maritime global trade is significant in presenting this exhibition of works with a focus upon relationships between motorways, railways, rivers and the sea as historical and contemporary spaces of communication and transport infrastructure between different cities. In their cityscape and waterscape works, Fergus Heron and Sachiyo Nishimura focus upon the photograph itself as a structured image; Heron's meticulous formal attention to the internal pictorial structure of the single photograph as part of ongoing series complements Nishimura's extension of the single photograph towards complex image configurations. Both place the photograph in a relationship to time and history where the absence of human activity in their work intensifies questions of when as much as where the photograph is made. Together, Heron and Nishimura reconsider infrastructures as possibilities of depicting urban landscape and seascape, and, perhaps more importantly, as renewed processes of seeing. The photography of Fergus Heron explores connections between landscape and architecture. Works from Heron's different ongoing series Motorways and Coasts contrast nature with infrastructure. Motorways, at once somewhere and nowhere, depict rural and urban convergence. Coasts depict where land meets water in nature and explore the potential of the sea to absorb our gaze. Both series consider such spaces to be historical, mapped, charted and navigable. Together, they propose the coast and the motorway as photographic subjects that structure our seeing in pictures. Sachiyo Nishimura abstracts and complicates the image of urban landscape through photomontages that reconstruct elements central to the development of contemporary cities. In her work, elements of transport infrastructure, industry and waterscape, unrelated to any specific locale therefore with an anonymous character, are brought together in a mathematical photographic re - composition. Nishimura proposes complex possibilities of imagining and remembering the city and the riverbanks