A Bright Haunting
Up until 2018 I mined my own archive of low-res camera-phone photos, exploiting their near-obsolete pixels that reinstate an optical touch to flat images. I selected subjects of surfaces which we simultaneously look at and through as a metaphor for the proliferation of screen-viewing, using the earliest surviving negative taken by William Henry Fox Talbot of a latticed window at Lacock Abbey as a reference point. The works in A Bright Haunting (2016–18), feature windows, blinds, curtains and shadows, which like the failing images, thicken the veil through which we see.
“...whilst there is doubtless a light beauty and exquisiteness to these pieces, the formal concerns of Harris’ work are not solely about aestheticisation and virtuosity of craft, nor do they attempt to revive art-historical fundamentalist rhetoric on teleological flatness. Rather, they are considered reflections on what structures contemporary experience and consciousness – in particular the rapidity and grain of image economy and the flattening of interaction onto the screen – as well as what might yet exceed capture by this leviathan.” extract from Bright Hauntings, Dr Jon K Shaw
WORKS
Shroud
Hand-cut pigment print
130 x 100cm
2018
Liquid Light
Hand-cut pigment print
102 x 130cm
2018
Seeing the Light
Hand-cut pigment print
97.5 x 126.5cm
2017
Virtual Window
Pencil rubbing on hand-cut pigment print
98 x 130cm
2016
Losing Sight
Red, green and blue Biro rubbing on pigment print, on aluminium
92 x 122cm
2017
Blind Light
Hand-cut pigment print
97 x 127cm
2016