Colin Carney
Colin Carney is an interdisciplinary artist located in Guelph Ontario. 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. In 2008 he traveled to Ireland and France to work with a variety of accomplished Irish artists courtesy of the Keith and Win Shantz Summer Internship award from the University of Waterloo. In 2009, Carney was the recipient of the Jack Gilbert award for Best Computer Altered Photography at the 48th annual Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition.
“My digital photographs are manipulated to extend the perceptual impact of the subject. By layering different exposures of the same object or circumstance onto itself I create an organic ‘other’. The layering facilitates curious intersections and contradictions. The resulting hybrid image is complicated in orientation and lends itself to memory. The secondary function of the work in this way is an unspecific evocation. My prints ultimately rest in a tension between ‘presentness’ and memory. ”
www.colincarney.com
On Colin Carney
‘Organic other’ please explain.Is there a non organic other?
How does and why does an image that is ‘complicated in orientation’ ‘lend inself to memory’?
It seems to me the work centres around time ,and layered perspectives .
All photographs are concerned with time and as such with mortality.Yes memory is connected to things past but the tension between ‘presentness’ and memory you suggest is not revealed the in the work.
This is academic jargon – free yourself before its too late.
Thank you for taking the time to consider my work and statement. Your commentary indicates your engagement with them and I am quite happy to elaborate on any area of critical concern.
First, let me say I am aware of what is academic here and in no way feel bound or trapped in it. But thank you for offering an out. I am a willing participant and feel no bristle at the mention of it.
On the issue of tension. You almost answer this for yourself in your criticism. The comment, “It seems to me the work centers around time and layered perspectives,” is a fair assessment. By collapsing many layers of the same subject, shot in the same circumstance at various vantage points into a singular image, I am interested in generating something specific. The viewer repeats their first experience with the subject when unpacking the elements, offering many opportunities for discovery. It is a bit like blending many extended first glances. Resting in and extending that glance before meaning is deciphered relates directly to Merleau-Ponty and “primary perception”. It would seem, based on your own work and statement, phenomenology is a mutually relevant area of photographic interest.
How this lends to memory. The viewer is afforded a position in this work to see the subject all at once without having to make sensible concrete conclusions about the truth of the subject or their position in relation to it. The memory of a subject is similar. Conflated by primary and secondary information without any pure certainty, memory harbors a similarly shifting perspective in time and vantage. This interests me and has been a part of my investigations for some time.
It is curious a word such as “organic” would seem so controversial. As a fellow printmaker you might be more sympathetic to the notion of growing an image through process.
That all this “is not revealed in the work” might matter more if there was no life to my work outside of it’s academia and I can accept your disinterest in or disapproval of it.
Best regards,
Colin.
Thanks for responding Colin,
I was hoping when backflash started this site that it would facilitate dialogue and critical thinking
about photography as an Art form. Unfortunately this largely has not happened.The only extended discussion I’m aware of is (significantly, in the context of my earlier comments) is about the world
of Academia .Yes I make work like yourself with the intent to challenge our frameworks
and attempt to place the viewer in a position that can reveal our symbolic relationships with the world .I’m interested in your process and images but reacted to the language.
I was being provocative and you have risen to the occasion with an elaboration that I appreciate.
Yes Growing an image through process.That is what its all about – including an involvement in the evolution of an image as an object ( print).Organic Other is the phrase that I found difficult – if you meant it to indicate process and growth of an image it seems to me that using the word ‘other’ in literary quotation marks brings in notions of power relationships and confuses your statement.
I like the idea of first glances – here we enter the world of image and myth.
You like myself are engaged with picture making and as we look around at comments on this site and in the pages of Backflash we often see could be called an illustration of or an extension of ideas that belong primarily in the field of social sciences .
Regards,
David
Hi Colin and David,
I put up a topic about art and research in the topics section to talk about BlackFlash, and possibly other magazines, using a “social sciences” dialogue to talk about art. It actually would be great to get your input on it so please feel free to share your ideas. You can link to it from the mainpage.
Thanks!
Some full disclosure – I am a Ph.D. art historian and related to David Pollock. David suggested I might be interested in reading the dialogue to date.
Having gone through some agonizing years of required reading of the art history jargon, I concluded a few things. One is that there is a terrific amount of unintelligble dross out there that just simply doesn’t end up being very useful. I am thinking especially of the psychoanalytic arguments that are based on limited samples and observation, third party reports at best, and “take my word for it” kinds of argumentation. Film studies has been especially plagued by this, though thankfully seems to be evolving beyond it. Having said that, among the pages of opaque argumentation, there are gems of really useful ideas. Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, Freud’s notion of the uncanny and so on (which comes to mind in Colin’s work of layered images). Third, when Colin uses the words “organic” and “other” I would urge caution, because if I have learned one thing above all else through the Ph.D., it is to be alert to specific words which come already heavily freighted with assocations. Organic for instance is one of the most abused words in the lexicon, misunderstood by non-scientists, rendered meaningless in the food industry and advertising and so on. So precision in language is an ongoing struggle in language in general. I urge my students to strive for precision in language as a scientist might aim for precise numbers. The concept of “otherness” as I am sure you all know fills entire libraries. I certainly understand Colin’s use of that word to describe his work, and it seems entirely apt.
The question of the (somtimes) forced link between the social sciences and art is as already noted often an attempt to assure audiences and potential audiences of the usefulness of the arts. I value art that offers those kinds of links but only when the aesthetics are absolutely primary and the social observations are complex, non-polemical, and come back to an individual perspective that is alive to that phenomenological content. The example of William Kentridge comes to mind (not a photographer though he does use some lens-based media. I am not completely conversant with the field of photographers). His work is rich, complex, and he has a political and social content, but it is always subordinate to the strong aesthetic content and his sensitivity to his location in time and space.
This is far more attention than I ever imagined for my six sentence statement offered to place my images in context of a thought I’ve been working through. Thank you Catherine for taking the time to consider all this.
The nature of my relationship to anything social scientific is through my artistic interest in filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Jack Chambers. Their relationship to phenomenology and making images captured and inspired me. Specifically Chambers’ notion of wonder has led me to think about my subjects in varying ways. I did not feel that a brief statement was an appropriate forum to elaborate.
My statement, rather, was meant to introduce the ideas surrounding my work which have been greatly influenced by an art historical context. Funny enough Catherine, the context is filmic in nature. This, I believe, is entirely appropriate when the discussion of the work is an accessory to its face value. It is there I wish to step off from being a part of any overarching illustrations of social scientific thought. That kind of thing leaves no room for these to be autonomous images.
It was not my intention for this to become about semantics or excellence in art-speak. It is a challenge to be precise as Catherine suggests and certainly relates to our varied elevations in the understanding of terms. I offer, “organic” is not an essential part of how I see things but rather a word that is familiar to me. It relates to printmaking processes and the discovery of an image when a print is pulled, layer upon layer. I was relating my digital practice to my manual practice in a way. That’s all. I could omit that word with little consequence to what I am offering as a photographer here. I’ll be more careful in the future.
When David first commented, I felt some clarity on the thoughts surrounding my work would be useful in a critical context and to the best of my ability did so. That seems to have opened and steered the conversation in an unfortunately opposite direction. I suppose David, despite being engaged in picture making, there is a magnetic pull at work to draw this discussion elsewhere.
Dagmara, thank you for the offer but I do not wish to weigh in on anything surrounding the “social science” dialogue. I bow to the more knowledgeable. That is far outside my humble interests and I think I have enough work cut out for me as an emerging imagesmith.
I think there is still opportunity to talk about the images though. They are after all, what is truly important to me. Thank you for your comments and insights.
Kind regards,
Colin.