Exhibition

Robin Cracknell: the camera suture

15 Jun 2007 – 21 Jul 2007

Cost of entry

free

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Whitecross Gallery

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Barbican / Old Street
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Whitecross Gallery is pleased to present the work of Robin Cracknell for his first solo exhibition in London.

About

Cracknell's ethereal work incorporates uniquely developed techniques
combining traditional film photography and cinematography with a
chemical deterioration process, giving his images an emotive
sensibility which conveys a narrative of love, language and loss.

Exploring a dichotomy between the reality of childhood and the
orchestrated family snapshot, Cracknell questions why our happy
moments are so eagerly art directed while the real story of childhood
languishes unrecorded with many of life's little miseries edited away.
With text, language, symbols and braille, he articulates a more
credible document of the perilous moonscape of childhood experience.

As a single father, Cracknell has not only watched the sand shifting
beneath his son's feet but has felt those same tremors himself and
often glimpsed his own desolation in his son's sparkling eyes. In
this sense the photographs of his son are in many ways self-portraits,
as in the shadow of divorce, father and son were left equally blind,
leading each other hand in hand towards the rim of the strange forest
in which they'd found themselves stranded. These photographs document their journey through the darkness and some points of light along the way.

From Cracknell's jaded adult view, the paradox of childhood reflects
the paradox of language. Just as proudly displayed 'happy' family
snapshots often conceal more than they reveal, words too, can so often fail us. Never is this more profound than on the tongue of a
stutterer where thoughts become nonsense and poetry slurs into
gibberish. In Cracknell's notebooks particularly, words are so
fragmented and scratched, erased and rewritten, that his own history
as a stutterer becomes evident and central to the story behind the
photographs.

The photographs here are individual, not editions. Each one is unique
to its date of printing, and although archival, it is the nature of
the chemical processes Cracknell uses on the negatives and
transparencies, that causes them to deteriorate with time, and react
in the way rust corrodes or daylight bleaches. While the finished
prints are completely stable, the colours and textures of the source
material are always and deliberately in a state of flux, the temporal
element being as crucial as the tonal aesthetics of light and shadow.
Like their subject matter and the places and feelings they document,
they will change, fade and ultimately vanish.

Born in India and educated in the US, Cracknell began his career as a
fashion photographer in Washington DC and Milan, after which he
enjoyed many years of commercial success in photo-illustration. This
showcase of photographs and drawings follows Cracknell's participation
in the Guardian 'Saatchi exhibition of September 2006, where he was
chosen as one of ten finalists amongst 12,000 artists from across the
globe. He was nominated by celebrated British sculptor, Marc Quinn,
and then selected by a panel of prestigious art critics, as well as
Guardian readers. The following quotes refer to this achievement.


Nigel Hurst, Director, Saatchi Gallery:

"We are thrilled that a gallery as highly regarded as Whitecross Gallery
has picked up on Robin Cracknell's work from Your Gallery. We were
delighted to have the opportunity to present Robin's unique photographs on our website and wish the artist and Whitecross Gallery every success with this exhibition" (May 2007)

Francesco Petillo, Director, Whitecross Gallery:

"Your Gallery is a really useful place to find artists. As soon as we
saw Robin's page on the Saatchi Gallery's website something clicked. We
were fascinated and wanted to see more..." (April 2007)

Rebecca Wilson, Editor, Saatchi Gallery:

"When we were deciding on the shortlist for the Your Gallery @ the
Guardian exhibition last October, Robin Cracknell's tender, beautiful
photographs really stood out. They suggest a sense of loss, a
nostalgia or longing for times past, their cracked, worn, faded
surfaces evoking fragments of narrative leaving us to wonder what was
happening on either side of the image in front of us. I think this is
one of the reasons why his photographs leave such an imprint in your
mind. We are absolutely delighted that being part of the Your Gallery
exhibition has led to his first major solo show in London." (April
2007)

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