COLIN CARNEY @ GALLERY 1313
Glass Onion
I work with imagery which is common or immediately circumstantial to my day to day life. I am interested in a kind of honesty about this. My subjects vary and remain elusive in a definitive sense about their constellation as a body. The series, however, is most certainly not a fiction or a metaphor. In this way it needs no linear connections.
This work addresses the impression of the subject, before meaning is bestowed upon it. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty described this as “perceptual impact”. I liken this to the closest notion of seeing with the eyes of a child. Permitted to be wondrous, optimistic or dark and at times unsure, the images are charged with kinetic experience. These extended first impressions inevitably lend themselves to memory. With this in mind, my work is afforded its secondary function as unspecific evocations.
Using digital veils of translucent photographs, the same subject is piled onto itself and an organic “other” occurs. The final image is a hybrid of three or more separate photographs shot in the same circumstance of the same subject. The cropping of each layer is decided when the individual photographs are initially shot and are not edited in production. In this way, the intersection of photographic information occurs honestly.
It is reasonable then to consider the title of the show. “Glass Onion” is an appropriated Beatles title. Historically, the song contributed to a host of contrived notions and false folklore about the Beatles’ lyrics which ultimately interfered with a primary experience of the music itself. It led to Lennon suggesting to stop looking for meaning that might not actually exist and to simply listen. The experience of listening to that song is quite lush.
Music, as I know it, relates so well to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “perceptual impact” and perhaps that is why guitars and stereos so often appear in my work as muses. When I was a child, with the record jacket in my hand, wearing ridiculously large bubble headphones, sitting cross-legged on the gold carpet in front of my dad’s homemade stereo stand, I liked that song because it was weird and made me happy.
Colin Carney
2009
About The Artist
Colin Carney is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Guelph. His interests in music and literature serve as perpetual sources of distraction and complication in his studio practice which continues to evolve. Carney acquired an Honours BA in Fine Art from the University of Guelph in ’98 and an MFA from the University of Waterloo in ’09. Carney was the recipient of the Jack Gilbert award for Best Computer Altered Photography at this year’s Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. Visit www.colincarney.com for more info.