Digital Art Show: Roger Beecroft and Neville Smith

A Digital Art Show touring from Zagreb to Maribor and Dortmund Live interviews with the artists was broadcast over the Internet for opening night, September 15th, 2000.

The controversial media commentary of Roger Beecroft shows alongside work exploring notions of light, time and travel by Neville Smith.

These two very different approaches to the use of digital media with photography were showing in Zagreb, Croatia in June 2000. The show was also seen in Maribor, Slovenia and Dortmund, Germany later on in 2000.

The opening night, at the Multimedia Centre KIBLA in Maribor, was being broadcast through the exhibition’s accompanying website in the form of a live webcast.

Both artists bring a wealth of experience from within the photographic world to the new frontier of the digital revolution, working with the new technologies from an informed and mature perspective. Both artists are Senior Lecturers on the Photography course at The Nottingham Trent University.

Essentially, Beecroft’s work is generated using digital manipulation technology to explore the world of television imagery. His work reflects the razzmatazz of the medium, the glowing screen, the quick cuts, the ‘talking heads’, the garish colours and the action. The subjects, however, reveal a deeper and darker preoccupation. He has exhibited with great success in London, New York, Manchester, Nottingham, Derby and Falmouth. His recent show in Cornwall had much media interest and helped in the promotion of the new town gallery.

Smith’s current interests lie in constructed images of fractured light emerging out of darkness, raising questions of perception and recognition. He has exhibited widely for many years in venues including Impressions Gallery, York, Photofusion, London and Watershed, Bristol – more recently at Focal Point Gallery, Southend and to celebrate the re-launch of the Roadmender Arts Centre, Northampton.

Ever since the birth of photography over 150 years ago there has been an urge to transform its mechanical (apparently) objective ‘drawing with light’ into a more (human) subjective statement. From the simple act of printing the negative ‘emulsion up’ to create portraits resembling what the sitter was used to seeing in the mirror (and therefore more comfortable with), through Man Ray’s solarisations to Rauchenberg’s collages and Warhol’s silkscreens. Recent times have seen ever more commonplace use of photographs as part of an artist’s mixed or multi-media work, and with increasing miniaturisation in computer technology the ‘digital age’ has added another technique to the repertoire of the contemporary artist.

Roger Beecroft and Neville Smith represent just two potentials for expression within what promises to be a complex, interesting and increasingly relevant new medium. The technology is growing so fast, and they are amongst the pioneers, responding from traditional artistic careers to the ever-widening horizons of uncharted territory. Beecroft is, in a sense, using the medium to comment upon the same technology’s influence upon contemporary life, and Smith uses it almost as a ‘natural’ development in photography’s evolution. But to see them as mere examples of the potential of the new medium is to ignore the wealth of non-digital experience which they bring to their work. The mechanical, or the electronic, is after all (and should be) just a tool in the hands of human expression.

About the artists

Roger Beecroft – The Artist
Roger Beecroft is an artist, photographer and senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts.

Roger’s interest in digital image manipulation began in the early nineties. Realising that here was a technology that would profoundly effect the visual arts, he began exploring its creative potential and power. It also turned out to be just what was needed in order for his own work to continue developing.

Although highly skilled with print and photographic methods, he found these limiting.

The new technologies have proved both liberating and demanding. Drawing, colour, design, photographic skills, selection, editing can all be combined to create new works with multiple meanings occupying a new digital space.

Roger has, for a number of years, run workshops at the University exploring the creative possibilities offered by the ultimate analogue approach to conventional photography – the hand-made camera. During these workshops, students investigated the potential combinations of physical optics (extra small apertures) and optics (simple lenses) together with radical camera body design, so as to create photographic images unattainable by conventional means. Photographs produced during these workshops have been shown throughout this country and Europe.

On first sight the concern for the digital manipulation of images and the desire to build hand-made cameras may appear incompatible activities; in fact, they both spring from the same creative need which is to understand how images work and to explore how differently they can be constructed.

He has taught both graduate and postgraduate courses at a number of major photographic institutions, including Manchester Metropolitan University, the Pratt Institute, New York City and he was also Visiting Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, New York.

Roger Beecroft - The Pictures
In the pictures we discover the depths of human depravity in the Holocaust triptych “Haunting Memory” and in the picture of serial killer Rosemary West, whose ultimate baseness is contrasted by the tragic portrait of Diana.

The similarity of the image construction used for both pictures only serves to heighten the polarised differences between the two women.

References are made to Bill Clinton’s sexual preoccupations in the “Comeback Kid” and “Slick Willie”.

A mixture of violence and media hype can be seen in “The Ring”; a digital collage of audience, showmen, promotion girls, advertising, punching, black tie and bare chests.

The ecstatic winner and broken loser of a gladiatorial boxing match. The media hyping of a television war is here in “Operation Desert Fox”; the four-day bombing campaign against Iraq where little action footage came out and the viewing public had to be both informed and entertained by commentators. Here we see the key words, initials and phrases glowing and spiraling transparently over the screen shaped building blocks of the image.

The shapes contain the frozen portraits of the leaders, politicians and commentators, fixed and vivid against the black surround.

The disaster and shame of the Balkans is referenced in the work “Kosovo/Kosova”. Here is a work without images, just the words torture, rape, murder, Europe 1999 repeated over and over again.

In the context of the Holocaust pictures, what more need be said? There are two portraits which outwardly are both lighter in feel.

The first, “Remembering John Macdonald still sailing ‘Girl Sara’, is a portrait honouring a departed friend; the second “Anja cleans the pool and does not think of Kristallnacht” is a picture of a young woman bathed in sunlight cleaning a swimming pool. It is the word “Kristallnacht” that stops the viewer’s quiet enjoyment and reawakens memories of the Nazi horror.

Also included is a single image interpretation of an opera,’Fiery Angel’ by Sergei Prokoviev. The story depicted is set in the 16th. Century and is about a respectable woman who retreats to a convent , after being seduced and abandoned by her Russian aristocrat lover. Her very presence corrupts the nuns who, in turn, start to cavort with devils. The church sends an inquisitor to investigate and he burns the nuns at the stake in order to save their souls.This picture was constructed as a practice piece from digitised and enhanced stills from a BBC programme of a production by the Royal Covent Garden in collaboration with the Kirov Opera Company. It is still included because the artist continues to enjoy the image.

Out of the Dark
Photographic Works by Neville Smith
Within the narrative that is concerned in notions of “Time and Travel” the work has constantly been engaged in images and forms that emerge out of the darkness.

From the blank, the void, the empty, light penetrates and constructs, presenting the “viewer” with shifting structures and facets of light which reveals another world. Another layer that captures with a still image snatched memories of fragmented states of awareness, and experiences of transient qualities and shifting focus which constantly change and are only fleetingly present. Images are created through the manipulation of the camera and reworked in a computer producing works, which are constantly concerned with the “view”, and “seeing” and “experiencing”. A “view” is a mental survey, a mental attitude and opinion. The images aim to raise visual awareness and questions of what the “viewer” perceives and comprehends as “real”.

Trainscapes
Light, Time and Travel
Shifting fractures of light constantly change our perception of space, and with the fusion of internal and external elements present the viewer with visual ambiguities that reveal another space.

Condensing the image using a panoramic format that focuses yet stretches the image, invites the viewer to engage in the edge and peripheral elements which constructs the whole and creates another window on the world.

With new technology there is the opportunity to manipulate and enhance the components within the image (and further utilise the captured light), to invoke the notion of movement in a society that is increasingly consumed by time and travel.
Neville Smith