Moyra Derby is Senior Lecturer in Painting at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury. Moyra's research interests are painting focused, as an exhibiting artist, curator and writer. Recent articles include 'Models of Attention' in the Journal of Contemporary Painting Vol 5 No 1 2019 and 'The Productive Inadequacy of Image for Contemporary Painting' in The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts Vol 2 No 1 2021: Image/Images: A Debate Between Philosophy and Visual Studies.
Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions that create intervals, often inadvertently forming ... more Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions that create intervals, often inadvertently forming part of the dialogue between the viewer and the work of art. This collaboration between five artists asks what happens when the cuts of image and spacing become the focus of attention, when compositional decisions expand into the space, activating responses to both imagery and context. {} Interval reflects on the momentary encounter, caught within or cut by the limit of rectangular support, viewfinder, picture space or film reel. The five artists will work collaboratively in the space, presenting works to be seen as components and supports for each other, negotiating how one work frames or cuts across another. As the collective installation for {} Interval takes shape, the set-up process will be documented as part of a live event and played back into the space. What constitutes the work, how to assess the arena of influence of one element to another will be approached as an open question...
In this paper the question, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’(1) whic... more In this paper the question, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’(1) which opened Yves Alain Bois's essay 'Painting as Model' is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuro-psychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. ‘Painting as Model’ argues for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This paper proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focus...
Lateral thinking, a term made popular by the philosopher/inventor Edward de Bono, is one Other-Ar... more Lateral thinking, a term made popular by the philosopher/inventor Edward de Bono, is one Other-Art Network (OA.N) chose to invoke for 'Lateral Futures' a group exhibition at OTHER SPACE, Goodnestone Park Gardens, Kent. Solving problems through an indirect, creative and sometimes seemingly random approach, the installation of work is on the basis of a provocation first in order to make sense of it afterwards. My contribution was a site responsive wall work, that connected with the anomalies of the site, a converted stable building, with the divisions of stalls, the placement of water troughs, the striations of floor, providing a compositional context for a series of phi cut painted and printed shapes. Artists in the exhibition: Grace Adam, Amelia Bowles, Owain Caruana-Davies, Craig Fisher, Benjamin Jones, Antoine Langenieux-Villard, Marco Milovanovic, Tom Plumptre, Fearghus Rafterty, Matthew Turner
Fully Awake, a group exhibition at blip blip blip, Leeds, April 2017. Curated by Ian Hartshorne a... more Fully Awake, a group exhibition at blip blip blip, Leeds, April 2017. Curated by Ian Hartshorne and Sean Kaye for Teaching Painting, Fully Awake was the first of a five part intergenerational cycle of exhibitions involving academics, artists and art educators in the UK. In each version of the show artists are invited to submit a piece of work to be included in an exhibition and to invite two ‘guests’; one must be an artist that they have been taught by, and one must be an artist that they have taught. In this case the invitation was to Moyra Derby and extended to Vanessa Jackson and Hannah Weatherhead
Carousel was a group exhibition that turns around the possibilities found within the field of abs... more Carousel was a group exhibition that turns around the possibilities found within the field of abstraction. At The Koppel Project Central, London in May 2019. The exhibition uses the idea of the carousel to evoke a quick succession of objects or bodies in motion. This offers an overview of the sensory spin that abstraction might aim to provoke through colour, form and materiality. Either through painting, or sculptural installation, Carousel grasps this concept metaphorically by confronting multiple notions, such as the use of language, geometric or gestural systems and the examination of the material of painting itself. The exhibition's intention was to simulate the intensity and absorption of a play space, highlighting the differences and similarities between each investigation. The heterogeneous nature of the works aimed to provoke an optical and tactile dizziness, thus allowing the works to become distorted or placed into focus, to probe at the myriad possibilities of materia...
<div> <p>This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary p... more <div> <p>This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary painting. The mutability of image is tested against the material, spatial and durational conditions of painting, and the attentional attachments it might mobilize through an examination of the working methods of Beth Harland, Jacqueline Humphries and R.H.Quaytman. Painting is not positioned as image, but as a processor of image information, able to prompt an image response, A resistance to image is framed by the art historical and philosophical legacy of image expectations and preclusions that each artist feels compelled to work against, and the expanding opticality of our contemporary social, cultural and economic interactions.</p> </div>
Contribution of new work to PRINTed International Artist book fair and exhibition at EINA Univers... more Contribution of new work to PRINTed International Artist book fair and exhibition at EINA University Gallery, Espai Barra de Ferro, Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art, Barcelona
Notes on Painting at Koppel Project Hive, London, examines painting's materiality in relation... more Notes on Painting at Koppel Project Hive, London, examines painting's materiality in relation to every day experience. It focuses painting in terms of the diagrammatic and provisional. Notes on Painting asks how can the texture of everyday life, its ever changing pace and rhythm, be embodied through the materiality of an artwork? This is addressed through installation, text, diagrams, painting, photography and moving image. The works represented economise and dispense with the formal definition of ‘painting’, questioning its construction and modes of making. Translated through various material manipulations, the exhibition urges us to consider that painting requires actual experience.
Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions that create intervals, often inadvertently forming ... more Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions that create intervals, often inadvertently forming part of the dialogue between the viewer and the work of art. This collaboration between five artists asks what happens when the cuts of image and spacing become the focus of attention, when compositional decisions expand into the space, activating responses to both imagery and context. Interval [ ] reflects on the momentary encounter, caught within or cut by the limit of rectangular support, viewfinder, picture space or film reel. The five artists will work collaboratively in the space, presenting works to be seen as components and supports for each other, negotiating how one work frames or cuts across another. As the collective installation for Interval [ ] takes shape, the set-up process will be documented as part of a live event and played back into the space. What constitutes the work, how to assess the arena of influence of one element to another will be approached as an open questi...
Participatory mobius strip produced live in the space as part of School of Beginnings at Tate Exc... more Participatory mobius strip produced live in the space as part of School of Beginnings at Tate Exchange. A long roll of paper was twisted into a mobius strip, so that the double-sided nature of a paper sheet was transferred to its single sided possibility as a continuous surface. The loop was manually fed through a workstation that provided a flat horizontal area covered in carbon copy paper. As the drawing loop passed through the workstation carbon transfer marks accumulated through the action of moving the paper, intentional marking of participants, and through the scuffs and blurs of previous marks as the loop continued. The Production Loop re-enacts a process of mark making that is associated with the term ‘drawing’, the generation of meaning through material manipulation. It recalls the revolutionary intent of faktura, and the anonymity of the worked surface. It offers visual evidence of production. It is unsure whether it has any end.
Interval [ ] still : now at Tintype Gallery London is part of an ongoing research project shared ... more Interval [ ] still : now at Tintype Gallery London is part of an ongoing research project shared by Conor Kelly, Moyra Derby, Nicky Hamlyn, Joan Key, and Jost Munster who have developed a model of collective, experimental set up and install. Interval implies a break or pause, a spatial or temporal in-betweenness, and the research is motivated by the potential for cross cuts, edits, and interruptions between works that operate as components within the expanded frame of a space. The set-ups are conceived as discursive and provisional, accessed as a pause in a sequence of possibilities. The Interval [ ] research approaches framing and spacing as shared convention between film and painting, and framing as a consequence of the architectural and durational containment of work through exhibition. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with writing by the artists and text interventions by Matthew de Pulford and Sharon Morris.
This text was contributed to the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition LIMBER: Sp... more This text was contributed to the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition LIMBER: Spatial Painting Practices, curated by Cherry Smyth and Jost Munster. The exhibition was held at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, University for the Creative Arts from 13 September to 12 October 2013, and at the Grandes Galleries de l’Erba, Rouen, France, from 21 November to 20 December 2013. As a part of the ICR (Interregional Culture-led Regeneration) Project and co-financed by the European Union INTERREG IVA Channel programme and UCA Research, this exhibition presented a group of international artists who explore and expand painting through a constructed 3D materiality.
A collaboration between Nicky Hamlyn, Conor Kelly, Joan Key, and Jost Munster. Between 27 Februar... more A collaboration between Nicky Hamlyn, Conor Kelly, Joan Key, and Jost Munster. Between 27 February and 1 March 2017, the Herbert Read Gallery at UCA Canterbury was used to develop an install event, stop gap, operating around the boundaries of still and moving image, considering framing and spacing as a shared context, particularly the breaks and cuts in space and duration that these imply. During ‘stop gap’ the artists involved occupied the space at different times, creating a to and fro of contact and encouraging an exchange of ideas about the concept of exhibition as improvisation. ‘stop gap’ values how interim solutions can produce crossovers and inter-dependencies, how chance identifications reveal productive glitches in the overlays and gaps between works and between intentions. A makeshift resolution of works was open to the public for a single day. The gallery space framed this resolution momentarily.
A visual symposium at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury during Nov 2012. Curated by Matthew de... more A visual symposium at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury during Nov 2012. Curated by Matthew de Pulford and Moyra Derby. Picture / Tableau / Screen are terms shared by film, photography, painting and other fine art practices. Four separate installations of work took place during November 2012 to consider the distinct but overlapping contexts they open up. Participating artists were: Angus Sanders-Dunnachie, Derek Hampson, Jost Munster, Mick Finch, Joan Key & Anton Lukoszevieze, Beth Harland & John Gillet, Laura Lisbon, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Nicky Hamlyn, Bob Matthews, Philomene Pirecki, Ian Bottle, Kate Hawkins, Anthony Mott, and Pat O'Connor.
In this article the question posed by Yve-Alain Bois via Hubert Damisch in Painting as Model, ‘wh... more In this article the question posed by Yve-Alain Bois via Hubert Damisch in Painting as Model, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’ (1990) is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuropsychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. Painting as Model argued for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This article proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focused, distributed and divided attention correlating with the cognitive complexity held by the structural, spatial and material conditions of painting.
In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s warns against considering depth and... more In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s warns against considering depth and breadth as interchangeable. Rather than following Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, this article considers the productive potential of equating depth with breadth, citing works by British painters Jane Harris, Beth Harland and John Wilkins. The tableau is proposed in this context as a holding apparatus, one that facilitates and contains a switch and shift between positions and dimensions. Holding is considered in three key ways: holding back, holding fast and holding attention, each one describing both the internal mechanisms of the tableau and its external relations with an observer. This holding characteristic is put forward as part of the constraints and potential of addressing a pictorial form, and connected to Michael Fried’s writing, and the absorbed and diverted attention described by Jonathan Crary. George Berkeley’s theories of vision are discussed via Merleau-Ponty, with breadth offered as a sideways version of depth, exposing the space between things and implying a repositioning of an observer to facilitate visibility. Although Meleau-Ponty outlines this exchangeability in order to discount it, this flexibility between one position and another, thinking oneself into a position rather than being there, is considered here as an active part of a pictorial practice, one that can inform a stand off between oppositional terms.
This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary painting. The mutabili... more This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary painting. The mutability of image is tested against the material, spatial and durational conditions of painting, and the attentional attachments it might mobilize through an examination of the working methods of Beth Harland, Jacqueline Humphries and R.H.Quaytman. Painting is not positioned as image, but as a processor of image information, able to prompt an image response, A resistance to image is framed by the art historical and philosophical legacy of image expectations and preclusions that each artist feels compelled to work against, and the expanding opticality of our contemporary social, cultural and economic interactions.
Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions that create intervals, often inadvertently forming ... more Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions that create intervals, often inadvertently forming part of the dialogue between the viewer and the work of art. This collaboration between five artists asks what happens when the cuts of image and spacing become the focus of attention, when compositional decisions expand into the space, activating responses to both imagery and context. {} Interval reflects on the momentary encounter, caught within or cut by the limit of rectangular support, viewfinder, picture space or film reel. The five artists will work collaboratively in the space, presenting works to be seen as components and supports for each other, negotiating how one work frames or cuts across another. As the collective installation for {} Interval takes shape, the set-up process will be documented as part of a live event and played back into the space. What constitutes the work, how to assess the arena of influence of one element to another will be approached as an open question...
In this paper the question, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’(1) whic... more In this paper the question, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’(1) which opened Yves Alain Bois's essay 'Painting as Model' is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuro-psychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. ‘Painting as Model’ argues for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This paper proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focus...
Lateral thinking, a term made popular by the philosopher/inventor Edward de Bono, is one Other-Ar... more Lateral thinking, a term made popular by the philosopher/inventor Edward de Bono, is one Other-Art Network (OA.N) chose to invoke for 'Lateral Futures' a group exhibition at OTHER SPACE, Goodnestone Park Gardens, Kent. Solving problems through an indirect, creative and sometimes seemingly random approach, the installation of work is on the basis of a provocation first in order to make sense of it afterwards. My contribution was a site responsive wall work, that connected with the anomalies of the site, a converted stable building, with the divisions of stalls, the placement of water troughs, the striations of floor, providing a compositional context for a series of phi cut painted and printed shapes. Artists in the exhibition: Grace Adam, Amelia Bowles, Owain Caruana-Davies, Craig Fisher, Benjamin Jones, Antoine Langenieux-Villard, Marco Milovanovic, Tom Plumptre, Fearghus Rafterty, Matthew Turner
Fully Awake, a group exhibition at blip blip blip, Leeds, April 2017. Curated by Ian Hartshorne a... more Fully Awake, a group exhibition at blip blip blip, Leeds, April 2017. Curated by Ian Hartshorne and Sean Kaye for Teaching Painting, Fully Awake was the first of a five part intergenerational cycle of exhibitions involving academics, artists and art educators in the UK. In each version of the show artists are invited to submit a piece of work to be included in an exhibition and to invite two ‘guests’; one must be an artist that they have been taught by, and one must be an artist that they have taught. In this case the invitation was to Moyra Derby and extended to Vanessa Jackson and Hannah Weatherhead
Carousel was a group exhibition that turns around the possibilities found within the field of abs... more Carousel was a group exhibition that turns around the possibilities found within the field of abstraction. At The Koppel Project Central, London in May 2019. The exhibition uses the idea of the carousel to evoke a quick succession of objects or bodies in motion. This offers an overview of the sensory spin that abstraction might aim to provoke through colour, form and materiality. Either through painting, or sculptural installation, Carousel grasps this concept metaphorically by confronting multiple notions, such as the use of language, geometric or gestural systems and the examination of the material of painting itself. The exhibition's intention was to simulate the intensity and absorption of a play space, highlighting the differences and similarities between each investigation. The heterogeneous nature of the works aimed to provoke an optical and tactile dizziness, thus allowing the works to become distorted or placed into focus, to probe at the myriad possibilities of materia...
<div> <p>This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary p... more <div> <p>This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary painting. The mutability of image is tested against the material, spatial and durational conditions of painting, and the attentional attachments it might mobilize through an examination of the working methods of Beth Harland, Jacqueline Humphries and R.H.Quaytman. Painting is not positioned as image, but as a processor of image information, able to prompt an image response, A resistance to image is framed by the art historical and philosophical legacy of image expectations and preclusions that each artist feels compelled to work against, and the expanding opticality of our contemporary social, cultural and economic interactions.</p> </div>
Contribution of new work to PRINTed International Artist book fair and exhibition at EINA Univers... more Contribution of new work to PRINTed International Artist book fair and exhibition at EINA University Gallery, Espai Barra de Ferro, Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art, Barcelona
Notes on Painting at Koppel Project Hive, London, examines painting's materiality in relation... more Notes on Painting at Koppel Project Hive, London, examines painting's materiality in relation to every day experience. It focuses painting in terms of the diagrammatic and provisional. Notes on Painting asks how can the texture of everyday life, its ever changing pace and rhythm, be embodied through the materiality of an artwork? This is addressed through installation, text, diagrams, painting, photography and moving image. The works represented economise and dispense with the formal definition of ‘painting’, questioning its construction and modes of making. Translated through various material manipulations, the exhibition urges us to consider that painting requires actual experience.
Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions that create intervals, often inadvertently forming ... more Framing and spacing are pictorial conventions that create intervals, often inadvertently forming part of the dialogue between the viewer and the work of art. This collaboration between five artists asks what happens when the cuts of image and spacing become the focus of attention, when compositional decisions expand into the space, activating responses to both imagery and context. Interval [ ] reflects on the momentary encounter, caught within or cut by the limit of rectangular support, viewfinder, picture space or film reel. The five artists will work collaboratively in the space, presenting works to be seen as components and supports for each other, negotiating how one work frames or cuts across another. As the collective installation for Interval [ ] takes shape, the set-up process will be documented as part of a live event and played back into the space. What constitutes the work, how to assess the arena of influence of one element to another will be approached as an open questi...
Participatory mobius strip produced live in the space as part of School of Beginnings at Tate Exc... more Participatory mobius strip produced live in the space as part of School of Beginnings at Tate Exchange. A long roll of paper was twisted into a mobius strip, so that the double-sided nature of a paper sheet was transferred to its single sided possibility as a continuous surface. The loop was manually fed through a workstation that provided a flat horizontal area covered in carbon copy paper. As the drawing loop passed through the workstation carbon transfer marks accumulated through the action of moving the paper, intentional marking of participants, and through the scuffs and blurs of previous marks as the loop continued. The Production Loop re-enacts a process of mark making that is associated with the term ‘drawing’, the generation of meaning through material manipulation. It recalls the revolutionary intent of faktura, and the anonymity of the worked surface. It offers visual evidence of production. It is unsure whether it has any end.
Interval [ ] still : now at Tintype Gallery London is part of an ongoing research project shared ... more Interval [ ] still : now at Tintype Gallery London is part of an ongoing research project shared by Conor Kelly, Moyra Derby, Nicky Hamlyn, Joan Key, and Jost Munster who have developed a model of collective, experimental set up and install. Interval implies a break or pause, a spatial or temporal in-betweenness, and the research is motivated by the potential for cross cuts, edits, and interruptions between works that operate as components within the expanded frame of a space. The set-ups are conceived as discursive and provisional, accessed as a pause in a sequence of possibilities. The Interval [ ] research approaches framing and spacing as shared convention between film and painting, and framing as a consequence of the architectural and durational containment of work through exhibition. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with writing by the artists and text interventions by Matthew de Pulford and Sharon Morris.
This text was contributed to the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition LIMBER: Sp... more This text was contributed to the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition LIMBER: Spatial Painting Practices, curated by Cherry Smyth and Jost Munster. The exhibition was held at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, University for the Creative Arts from 13 September to 12 October 2013, and at the Grandes Galleries de l’Erba, Rouen, France, from 21 November to 20 December 2013. As a part of the ICR (Interregional Culture-led Regeneration) Project and co-financed by the European Union INTERREG IVA Channel programme and UCA Research, this exhibition presented a group of international artists who explore and expand painting through a constructed 3D materiality.
A collaboration between Nicky Hamlyn, Conor Kelly, Joan Key, and Jost Munster. Between 27 Februar... more A collaboration between Nicky Hamlyn, Conor Kelly, Joan Key, and Jost Munster. Between 27 February and 1 March 2017, the Herbert Read Gallery at UCA Canterbury was used to develop an install event, stop gap, operating around the boundaries of still and moving image, considering framing and spacing as a shared context, particularly the breaks and cuts in space and duration that these imply. During ‘stop gap’ the artists involved occupied the space at different times, creating a to and fro of contact and encouraging an exchange of ideas about the concept of exhibition as improvisation. ‘stop gap’ values how interim solutions can produce crossovers and inter-dependencies, how chance identifications reveal productive glitches in the overlays and gaps between works and between intentions. A makeshift resolution of works was open to the public for a single day. The gallery space framed this resolution momentarily.
A visual symposium at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury during Nov 2012. Curated by Matthew de... more A visual symposium at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury during Nov 2012. Curated by Matthew de Pulford and Moyra Derby. Picture / Tableau / Screen are terms shared by film, photography, painting and other fine art practices. Four separate installations of work took place during November 2012 to consider the distinct but overlapping contexts they open up. Participating artists were: Angus Sanders-Dunnachie, Derek Hampson, Jost Munster, Mick Finch, Joan Key & Anton Lukoszevieze, Beth Harland & John Gillet, Laura Lisbon, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Nicky Hamlyn, Bob Matthews, Philomene Pirecki, Ian Bottle, Kate Hawkins, Anthony Mott, and Pat O'Connor.
In this article the question posed by Yve-Alain Bois via Hubert Damisch in Painting as Model, ‘wh... more In this article the question posed by Yve-Alain Bois via Hubert Damisch in Painting as Model, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’ (1990) is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuropsychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. Painting as Model argued for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This article proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focused, distributed and divided attention correlating with the cognitive complexity held by the structural, spatial and material conditions of painting.
In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s warns against considering depth and... more In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s warns against considering depth and breadth as interchangeable. Rather than following Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, this article considers the productive potential of equating depth with breadth, citing works by British painters Jane Harris, Beth Harland and John Wilkins. The tableau is proposed in this context as a holding apparatus, one that facilitates and contains a switch and shift between positions and dimensions. Holding is considered in three key ways: holding back, holding fast and holding attention, each one describing both the internal mechanisms of the tableau and its external relations with an observer. This holding characteristic is put forward as part of the constraints and potential of addressing a pictorial form, and connected to Michael Fried’s writing, and the absorbed and diverted attention described by Jonathan Crary. George Berkeley’s theories of vision are discussed via Merleau-Ponty, with breadth offered as a sideways version of depth, exposing the space between things and implying a repositioning of an observer to facilitate visibility. Although Meleau-Ponty outlines this exchangeability in order to discount it, this flexibility between one position and another, thinking oneself into a position rather than being there, is considered here as an active part of a pictorial practice, one that can inform a stand off between oppositional terms.
This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary painting. The mutabili... more This article considers the productive inadequacy of image for contemporary painting. The mutability of image is tested against the material, spatial and durational conditions of painting, and the attentional attachments it might mobilize through an examination of the working methods of Beth Harland, Jacqueline Humphries and R.H.Quaytman. Painting is not positioned as image, but as a processor of image information, able to prompt an image response, A resistance to image is framed by the art historical and philosophical legacy of image expectations and preclusions that each artist feels compelled to work against, and the expanding opticality of our contemporary social, cultural and economic interactions.
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