Douglas Mandry A Brief Crack of Light
Bildhalle
November 5, 2020
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January 30, 2021
The writer Vladimir Nabokov described human existence as ‘a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ Nabokov was concerned with the relatively short span of a human lifetime. Douglas Mandry explores a longer timeline – one that reaches from the earth’s geological past towards its possible future, and that encompasses the current era known as the Anthropocene. Though he works with photography, Mandry’s images are more than documents of a changing world. Some make subtle interventions into traditional representations of landscape; others bear physical traces of the mechanisms of climate change that define our relationship to the planet in the present.
The conventional landscape view is a visual device that creates a distance between the viewer and their surroundings. Modern cameras can give us detailed images of the planet from miles above its surface. Mandry prefers less sophisticated methods, not out of nostalgia for the past, but as a means of bridging the distance imposed by visual technologies. Thus his choice, in Monuments, to use the relatively primitive technique of the photogram, which requires physical engagement with the melting glacial ice that is his subject. The resulting images replace distanced views with material traces of the processes that are transforming the landscape. Similarly, the sheets of fabric onto which he prints – scraps of the immense geotextile blankets placed onto glaciers to stabilise their temperature – bear the marks and stains of the meltwater that soaks through them. The collaged and overpainted photographs in Still Wonder pay tribute to a Swiss tradition of landscape painting, while proposing a tactile and personal experience of place. Mandry’s work draws historical imagery of the region into dialogue with the present.
Many of Mandry’s pieces tend towards abstraction – an acknowledgment, in part, that the processes driving climate change are too complex to show in an image. They also challenge the complacency that sets in when we view photographs of events taking place somewhere else. Mandry’s images bring this ‘somewhere else’ up close, and in doing so, they raise questions that documentary photography cannot. In a time of ecological crisis, they suggest that there is more to be achieved by taking action than by sitting back and observing, sounding a note of cautious hope as we look towards an uncertain future.
About
Douglas Mandry (*1989, CH) is an artist who lives and works in Zurich. He gained a Bachelors in both Visual Communication and Photography from the University of Art and Design ECAL in Lausanne. Since graduating Mandry has been nominated for numerous awards including the Paul Huf Award, Swiss Federal Design Award and got awarded as «Foam Talent 2020». His work has been shown in international venues including Photo London, Photo Basel, Art Paris, Unseen Photo Fair, Foam Museum Amsterdam or Kunstmuseum Wien. Bildhalle dedicated two solo shows in 2016 and 2018 to his work.
Mandry’s practice is a direct response to the digitalization of photography and the technological accelerations that came along with it. Always shooting his initial images in analogue, all of Mandry’s interventions in the image are done by hand, through the application of different historic photographic processes or by physically cutting and pasting. «Seductively beautiful in the use of color, the diversity of form and the choice of materials while, simultaneously, being conceptually sophisticated in terms of subject-matters and photographic processes: the starting points for the artist Douglas Mandry (b. 1989 in Geneva), who has moved to Zurich in 2013, are real world phenomena and experimenting with various photographic techniques. Oscillating between historical analogue and contemporary digital imaging methods, the artist creates his very own pictorial worlds. Observations in nature and the examination of current issues merge in his work with his reflections regarding his chosen medium photography - documentation with abstraction, reasoning with sensuality. Conceptual rigor and experimental liberties are well balanced in Douglas Mandry’s work, and the autonomous nature of photographic processes bears serendipitous results: the unforeseen meets intention and idea. This way, complex issues receive poetic allure. Each work retains a productive riddle that encourages us to question our perception of the reality of the world and the reality of images.»
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