The Quietened Sound Mirror IV
2024
Monochrome giclee print
24 x 20
Unloud exhibition
Catalogue essay “All quiet on the spectral front” and contribution to the group show curated by Ashley Gallant and Charles Fox, at Turntable Gallery in Grimsby.
Exhibition description:
“Some art is loud, it screams with its politics, wears its heart on its sleeve. Other art is quiet and doesn’t say anything at all, its mute in its purposelessness. Curator and photographer Ashley Gallant says ‘I have never been interested in either. I am interested in the un-loud.’
This exhibition brings together three smaller displays of internationally recognised photographers that all share an uneasiness, or a feeling of the unfinished or unsaid in the photographs displayed under the theme of the unloud.”
Quote from the catalogue essay:
“Devastating change is not always loud or immediate. It often creeps up on us over time. In this age of polycrisis we see this in slowly rising sea-levels, or the news cycle inching us towards war or economic collapse. On a much smaller and personal scale, we can notice something similar during a protracted terminal illness, gradually falling out of love with a partner, or in noticing how much our hometown has changed since childhood. The photograph can prove to be a poignant waymarker along such trajectories, quietly signifying transformation through the presentation of troubling absences.”
The exhibition features a photograph from The Quietened Sound Mirrors series (2024), some further examples of this work can be found below.
The Quietened Sound Mirrors
Denge sound mirrors were always quiet. Originally designed to amplify the faintest echoes of enemy craft, they were quickly rendered obsolete as the technologies of war inevitably changed. These modern ruins now seem to stand as monuments for conflicts that never happened, for futures that never came to pass. Inspired by the hauntological music of The Quietened Bunker (A Year In The Country, 2016), these photographs re-examine the concrete structures for what they might have to say to us in the present.
Like those nuclear bunkers, the sound mirrors never saw military action, yet they still inspire something haunted today. Photographers and history buffs descend on the island, on the rare open days run by the RSPB. Their bizarre acoustic properties can still be activated. Whisper at one end of the 200-foot mirror, and hear your voice eerily recreated at the other. What is reflected back, merely mirrors what we project onto it.
