#copperfield gallery

[unitedstatesofvisual]

Darren Harvey-Regan - The Erratics

Entwining image and object, the work of Darren Harvey-Regan (b. 1974 Exeter) often sees a hybridisation of the conventions of photography and sculpture. As quietly humorous as they are frustrating his works challenge the viewer to distinguish where representation ends and the object begins. “The presentation of photographs in interaction with objects serves to highlight the inherent tensions within representation; between the photograph as an object and the image of the world it contains. In this way, I consider the photograph as being something not only to think about, but to think with.” Darren Harvey-Regan is a graduate of the Royal College of Art. His work has appeared in exhibitions and publications internationally and is part of the permenant photography collection at the V & A Museum, London. His solo exhibitions include Meralepsis, Copperfield Gallery, London (2017); The Erratics, Copperfield, London (2015 - 2016); The Erratics, Passaggi - Arte Contemporanea, Pisa (2015); Phrasings, Ravestijn, Amsterdam (2013); A Shifting Sense of Things, Sumarria Lunn, London (2013); A Collection of Gaps, Phoenix, Exeter (2011); and Fact, Room Gallery, London (2011). Group shows include Walker Evens Revisited curated by David Campany, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (2020); Pic.London, Ambika P3, London (2017); Perfectionism (part iii): The Alchemy of Making, Griffin Gallery, London (2016); MAC International, finalist, Belfast (2016); Not Really Really, Collection Frédéric de Goldschmidt, Quai du Commerce, Brussels (2016); In and Out - Spatial Correspondence, RAUMX, London (2016); Against Nature, Photo50 curated by Sheyi Bankale, London (2015); A History of Photography, V & A, London (2014); Exile, ONCA, Brighton (2014); Act & Application, Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai (2014); GeoGráfica, FOTOTROPIA, Guatemala City (2013); The Animal Gaze Returned, Sheffield Institute of Arts (2013); Moves, Chandelier Projects, London (2013); Confined, Nest, Den Haag (2012); Recasting the Gods, Sumarria Lunn, London (2012); Collaborators 3, ROOM, London (2012); Breaking Surfaces, Jette Rudolph, Berlin (2012);  I’ll Be Your Mirror, Monte Vista, LA & Nancy Kranzberg, St Louis (2012); The Animal Gaze Returned, Cass, London (2011); Object Dada, Edel Assanti, London (2011); Photography as Object, Sumarria Lunn Gallery, London (2011); Catlin Prize, London (2011); New Contemporaries, ICA, London (2010); Elisions / Show One, Gulbenkian Galleries, RCA, London (2010). Darren Harvey-Regan is a recipient of the Leverhulme Trust Award (2009) and is part of the Hal Silver collective. Publications include The Erratics, RVB Books, monograph, Paris (2017); Constructed: The Contemporary History of The Contructed Image in Photography Since 1990, Routledge, New York (2017); Photography is Magic, Charlotte Cotton, Aperture, New York (2015). His book 'The Erratics' has been shortlisted of the Aperture/ Paris Photo First Photobook Award (2017). For his most recent solo exhibition with the gallery: http://www.copperfieldgallery.com/darren-harvey---regan.html

[thinkingimages]

Oscar M | The Intruder (2015) | To Break a Silence into Smaller Silences at the Copperfield Gallery in London.

[artfulbloggeruk]

An interview with Darren Harvey-Regan

Tell me a bit about your work….

In a nutshell, my work circles around photography with an emphasis on the medium's relationship to language and to sculpture.

Could you tell me a bit more about the ways in which you have categorised your work (on your website- Fiction/Non-Fiction, and individually by group title- Elisions etc. and the significance of this?

The fiction and non-fiction divide was a means of thinking about the way the subject was treated within different works: within the fiction strand the depicted subjects are to be primarily seen as they are, taken as themselves rather than directly representing something else.  The non-fiction strand – that Metalepsis belongs to -  sees a focus on the image and the changing state of a subject through its associative meanings and formal properties.  The divide is a means to incorporate this recent strand of work into the structure I've currently adopted to present my practice.

I see a website as a framing device for my practice and it's important for me to find a structure that helps me conceptualise the work.  When or if this current system gets unwieldy or unhelpful I'll find another one!

What inspires you?

I'm typically most inspired by ideas and art a little outside my own direct practice. I'm incredibly inspired by literature, the forming potential of words to convey ideas in narrative.  I'm very inspired by debates early in the history of modern art about the validity of abstraction, primarily in painting.  The possibility in theatre too for the construct of the art form to be so present and at the same time our ability to believe the story.  I like to see how my practice can translate ideas and possibilities outside of my primary medium.

Whose work do you most admire? Do you see your work as intertextual in any way?

I tend to feel more fascination toward painters, CY Twombly and Howard Hodgkin for example.  I’m inspired by both the play and the ideas in John Bladessari and Rene Magritte.  Bill Watterson is untouchable, as is Gary Larson and Sergio Aragones.

I certainly see my work as being at an intersection of photography and sculpture, though my thinking about it is dervied from the side of the photographic.  Photography is a medium that typically hides its own materiality  - we commonly look at an image rather than the material surface it appears to us on. Photography translates everything to surface, its depicted world flattened, the space is squeezed out of it. And yet it still usually looks like the world we know.  This sets up tensions between the world and the image, the two and the three-dimensional, surface and mass, appearance and experience, etc.  Someone - and I forget who! - said making art is about setting up an encounter between two things and seeing what happens.  I feel like the encounter between photography and sculpture creates physical and conceptual spaces that interests me; it resonates with a type of ambiguity and cannot be entirely defined as one thing or another.

Also I feel like the two have different relationships to us, to the body and to the mind, the inner and outer life perhaps: Sculpture is itself: material presence in immediate space and time.  Photography is 'of' something else: a thing, a space or a time that was. I think that means photography exists more in the mind, in relationship to ideas, memory and imagination while sculpture, in its presence, exists more in relationship to touch, to the body.

What is the relationship between form and content in your work?

I like the directness of form in an immediate object, a way of using the camera that is very close to perception, so to a large extent the strong form of an object appears as itself, hiding the process of the medium.  I tend to aim for an uncontested clarity in which the subject can be apprehended as much in its own terms as possible.  I think this creates a more consciously quiter aesthitic and greater sense of focus, of the eyes and the mind being drawn into the one space. It's perhaps a visual way of directly asking what are seeing, an  apperceptive question.

Photography is for you, essentially a means of interrogation, is that fair to say?

Certainly, in the sense its a medium that speaks in appearances - one that we are completely fluent in. It speaks in surfaces, fictions easily apprehended as facts.  Therefore it's an apperceptive process relaint on context and interpretation, it's a complicated medium that appears simple and works at the meeting point between the world as it is found and the world as it is made.  

How do you go about constructing your work?

Photography is my effectively my primary language so I tend to think of it first and ask how other mediums and ideas can relate to it or be similarly expressed through it.  Sculptural works might develop for example, from thinking about photography's typical characteristics and how they differ from or align with those of sculpture.  

Much of my work is scuplptural in process and photographic in the end result. Many pieces have recreated photographic tropes in real life, such as the cut tools that look like photo montage or the painted vase that looks like Photoshop's empty space.  The fact photography has the ability to create objects makes objects themselves a fascinating subject matter. Unlike living things, effects or views, objects perhaps retain the most in photographic translation, or at least typically appear close enough to the way we see them in real life: the eye and the lens are not so dissimilar.   So for me photographs of/with/as objects creates an intriguing context offering the most overlap with the world as it is and the world as photography makes it. It is where photography's reciprocal relationship is at its most acute.

There seems something elusive and peculiarly cryptic about the images you produce, what effect do you see your work as having on the viewer?

I honestly try not to think about the work's effect on viewers.  While I think that is something that should never be too primary a focus I feel like the work is quiet and contemplative overall so anything that reflects that is always rewarding.

What is the work you are most proud of thus far?

The piece Metalepsis, an installation work that formed very slowly and organically over time. Because of this it's a process that I felt I excercised little conscious control over so it feels very fresh to me, very other.

Are you working on anything at present?  Do you have any upcoming shows?

I have the first showing of some new work titled The Erratics at Passaggi-Arte Contemporanea in Pisa in April. It combines photographs of huge natural chalk forms found in the desert, images of carved chalk rocks shot in the studio and some sculptural elements.  I'll be showing some with The Ravestijn Gallery at Photo London and Unseen this year and have a solo presentation of the work with Copperfield Gallery in London in October.

lE��p�\�

[heist]

Tom Dale, Department of the Interior

[mushmuly]

by Tom Dale