Unravelling Photography @ Michael West Gallery, Quay Arts, Isle of Wight (6th May - 10th June 2006)
Photography has a unique ability to embrace many questions and this exhibition will pose questions evolved around the four themes. How does photography reshape our memories? Why do photographs of places stimulate familiar sensations of location? How does the photograph manipulate perception? And do we stop seeing/looking in this contemporary age of image making? Unravelling Photography’ will reveal an investigation into this particular artform. The images within this exhibition will depict the journey of four photographers each tussling with the medium in distinct, but nevertheless related, manners. The main tropes that can be said to link the work of these artists: narrative, reality, looking, fissure, seeing, perception, transience, memory; are all concerned with what exactly it is that photography does. The four commissions will see artists attempt to unravel: Memory; Looking; Perception; and Place.

Dan Boetker-Smith Fergus Heron
Karen Grainger
Matthew Pontin

www.quayarts.org
Distance and Distraction @ YAM Parlour, Penzance (10th January - 11th February 2006)

YAM Parlour photography gallery and cafe exhibited work made my Matthew during his MA in Photography at University College Falmouth. The work on display explores the illusory nature of travel experiences and explores the motives behind image making on actual journeys. The work makes us question why we constantly document 'real' experiences, the fact that Pontin journeys to nowhere in particular leaves the viewer to ponder on what constitutes as an actual experience in reference to virtual simulations.
HyperMArt @ Woodlane Campus, Falmouth (16th - 21st September 2005)
Sitting comfortably inside coach one, on seat fifty-one, I notice through the train window a young couple approach a solitary traveller and ask if he would take their photograph. He slowly lowers his bag onto the platform, accepts the camera handed to him and frames the image capturing the couple, smiling and facing forward, with the scene that is the 9.04am Eurostar to Paris as the backdrop. Having just witnessed the birth of this photograph I begin to imagine the journey it will make, contemplating the eyes that may one-day view it and considering what value will it hold in the future. Some weeks later a website advertising photographic services boldly warns Memories at Risk! A real photo will keep them forever. Click here for more info...

In a world mediated for expedient consumption, are memories not rather at risk from real photographs? Within our already overloaded visual environment, the greater risk is conceivably that is photography passively providing yet more representations of reality, even more distractions. The series Distance and Distraction enables me to embark on actual and virtual journeys that explore the potential to reverse a personal disillusion with the real.
 
Intervision @ Dray Walk Gallery, London (7th - 11th September 2005)

 

 Intervision appear at Dray Walk, Brick Lane, London as part of Truman's Free Range Masters of Art Event. This show was undertaken by graduates on the MA Photography course at University College Falmouth and more of their work can be view at www.intervisionphoto.co.uk. Pontin's work existed as a sequence of photographs accompanied by an animation of web-appropriated jpgs examining the nature of travel experiences and photographs. More of this work can be seen in the portfolio section under the series Distance and Distraction.
Bea Grist - Sergio Fava - Becky Joiner - Sonia McDuff - Elizabeth Orcutt - Matthew Pontin
Still Stories @ Falmouth Art Centre (19th - 23rd April 2005)

pseudo-memories & questions of travel

Inspired by Huysmans’ novel Against Nature and earlier personal research into and alongside agoraphobia sufferers, my current practice continues to explore the notion of presence within travel experiences. I am uncomfortable with photography passively providing footage of this presence, and am hesitant, as an image-maker, by the abundance of representations of reality within our overloaded visual environment.

Tourism as a force driven by visual advertising evokes an emotion state that potentially contributes to the atrophy of actual experience. Why photograph? Such tourist displays occur as a means of signifying existence, where the past experience provides an identity and future experience promises pleasure. This body of work attempts to establish the potential of re-embracing the present, highlighting actual experience and declining the desire for mechanisms to turn it into the past for the future.

 
The Christmas Tree Show @ The Quay Arts Centre, Isle of Wight (8th November - 20th December 2003)

The Christmas Tree Show brought together a selection of artists working in various disciplines. Taking a Christmas Tree as inspiration a diverse selection of works in this quirky show with a seasonal twist.

The series produced for this group show was titled 'Christmas Appropriated' where festive visual imagery from the web is archived in specific reference to the iconic 'tree'. Jpegs were then reworked and incorporated into a fake Christmas tree, re-photographed and placed as decorations in their own right.

The work essentially enables the viewer to reference the common imagery that emerges around Christmas time. These domestic environments become increasingly absurd through the repetitive inclusion of the tree.

 
 
Remembering Ryde @ The Prince Consort, Ryde, Isle of Wight (5th July- 20th July 2003)

Remembering Ryde developed as a community driven project looking back at the period of Ryde in the 1950s and was created by Matthew and artist/filmmaker Darrin Cooper. The collaboration stimulated two video installations that provide a nostalgic journey of memory and recollection to evolve. The historic photographs from the period were researched and reworked in a contemporary context, the exhibition provokes the viewer rather than simply stands as a setting to witness images from the past. The space itself providing a link to memories of such a vibrant moment in Ryde's history. The project hopes to develop and potentially provided a continuously updated record of archival imagery.

           
Reminiscence @ Julia Margaret Cameron Gallery, Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight (16th May - 30th June 2003)  

Reminiscence, at Freshwater Bay where Matthew grew up, evolved from collaboration with IOW charity Independent Arts. Working as artist in residence, he has documented the organisation's activities whilst developing his own personal work based upon notion of experience and memory. Photography is often nostalgia that informs our memory, a snapshot freezes time, memory and time are inseparable. Photographing within residential and nursing homes Matthew has observed therapeutic work that encourages the independence of the individual. Reminiscence visually connects a physical presence to a re-collective past, incorporating the strong identities of the mentally and physically disabled and older persons Matthew has worked alongside. Reminiscence explores how fragments can be captured and represent a past, recollective memories are stirred and stimulated by photographs. Reverie exists within the image, a moment lost then visually restored in minute detail. This first solo-show, which sits wonderfully in the former home of Julia Margaret Cameron, reveals an instinctive ability to portray through intense moments an expression that urges the viewer to examine the image beyond its two-dimensional form. For more info visit the gallery at www.dimbola.co.uk
         
Ha-Ha: Margam Revisited @ The Orangery, Margam County Park, Wales (12th November - 12th December 2002)  

Driving down the M4 towards Port Talbot presents an extraordinary visual spectacle. On our right we see a grand stately home perched on the hillside, nestled among woodland and rolling hills. On our left, smoke billows from huge chimneys emanating from vast steel structures which occupy a huge strip in front of the sea. Sprawling between these two very different configurations lies the community of Port Talbot with the giant, concrete motorway towering over rooftops, separating street from street, neighbour from neighbour. In this sense the community seems dwarfed by the forces of nature and industry. These very disparate layers in this bizarre landscape form the basis for 'HaHa: margam revisited', an exhibition hosted in the elegant Orangery at Margam Country Park, once stomping ground to Henry Fox-Talbot, creator of the 'pencil of nature' (the calotype in 1840). A number of artists from Wales, the UK and Europe visited the area, each exploring different aspects of this unique environment. We are presented with children playing with towering structures interrupting the otherwise idyllic setting; fragments and glimpses of an environment which is historically divided, but now becoming de-politicised as the tourist industry invites the local constituency to places once exclusive; and images which exist only in the world of internet applications. Matthew's series of images for this project entitled 'Resurrected Landscapes' can be viewed at in the Ha-Ha: Margam Revisited section of his online portfolio.
Chris Dyer - Peter Finnemore - Tatjana Hallbaum - Karen Ingham - Adam O'Meara - Richard Page - Matthew Pontin - Miranda Walker
           
Interiorisation @ The Well, Brick Lane, London, Degree Show (12th June - 17th June 2002)  
Photography has become attached to experience and visual domestication of the unfamiliar encourages a weakening of the memory. Interiorisation explores how the visually simulated experience shapes memory and examines the impact of imagery streaming into the home environment. The human capacity to move from place to place physically and imaginatively is driven by our desire for the 'somewhere-else' subsequently recollective pleasures will emerge dependent upon photographic reverie. Interiorisation emphasises the non-travel experience revealing presence as a mental manifestation that can be manipulated through visual simulation. The development of the media and the internet contribute to the atrophy of actual experience, evoking a series of various emotional states, the authenticity of each simulation conducive to fantasising and indicative to the rejection of reality. Personal travel imagery and resurrected internet travel imagery are combined and anchored through the inclusion of agoraphobia sufferers and their personal spaces. The projections of iconic travel images raise issues about time, place and simulation whilst exploring visual interaction within a confined space. The work becomes illusionary rather than simply a description of individuals constrained to an indoor existence. Interiorisation comments on society's increasing withdrawal to a four-walled environment where experience is absorbed visually, the subjection to and familiarisation to such imagery ultimately leads to the dissatisfaction of actual experience. Real truths exist more strongly in memories and dreams and in the realisation of the moment.