The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery
Luke White
They Are Not Windows
4 - 25 February 2023
'They are not windows but images, i.e., surfaces that translate everything into states of things; like all images they have a magical effect; and they entice those receiving them to project this un-decoded magic onto the world out there.' - Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 1984
They Are Not Windows, the first solo exhibition by British photographer, Luke White, opens this week at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery. The exhibition features new work by the artist that challenges ideas about the documentary aims of the photograph. In his most recent body of work Luke White experiments with large-format black-and-white analogue photography and digital collage techniques. The result is one of ambiguous figuration and abstraction. These processes prompt an engagement with the photograph as dynamic, rather than the product of an instantaneous process.
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White's work resonates with Vilem Flusser’s proposition in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1984), where the photograph is described as a mobile and ‘magical’ surface through which coded messages are transmitted. White explores how the malleability of the photograph translates to a permeable boundary that enables a sensory connection between artist, viewer, and subject.
'We are all engaged in a kind of dance. It’s like a dream world... My feeling is that when we wake up, we don’t stop dreaming. These fragmented, refracted, intimate spaces reflect the way I piece together and touch the world. I suppose I am trying to show what seeing actually feels like.' ― Luke White
