SUMMER STUDIO | THE SPACES BETWEEN

13 – 15 January 2011

Melanie Jayne Taylor

Rather then leave the gallery empty over the holiday season this year, Melanie Jayne Taylor and Helen Grogan were given the keys to Blindside and, starting from scratch, asked to have an exhibition ready in four and a half weeks, a duration far exceeding the usual two-day installation time. The public are invited to view the results that both highlight and fracture the boundaries between idea inception, exploration, creation and presentation.

THE SPACES BETWEEN

In January 2011, Melanie Jayne Taylor undertook a Summer Studio Residency within BLINDSIDE’s gallery space. Using imagery from her extensive photographic archive, Melanie Jayne explored the physical capacity of the photograph to open up a dialogue between image, sculpture and architecture. ‘My methodology attempts to tie photography back to the way that we experience things in real life. Time operates in an organic and continuous way ‘but our experiences and recollections are fragmentary’.1

Employing the medium of print photography, Melanie Jayne’s sophisticated imagery manipulates and transforms time through the considered placement of the photographs within the exhibition space. These ‘brief and arbitrary glimpses draw attention to all we are not seeing in order to address the complicated world outside the frame’.2

Playing with the architectural features of the gallery, the photographs offer a series of partial views into the world that complement the window panels, its grid acting as a metaphor for how photography frames subjective experience. The plinths provide an additional mechanism for placing, ordering and viewing the pictorial content of the work, playing with notions of sculpture in relation to the room.

Melanie Jayne Taylor’s installation invites us to recollect and reflect. Glancing out, across and over, we are drawn into a forest, a room, an abandoned observatory; we are presented with the residual fragments of images and events that inspire us to construct our own narratives. A story unfolds, quietly, out of time. A monumentality glimpsed fleetingly; a life within and beyond. Have we been there before? Perhaps. Now, but not of this time.

‘All events in their passing, leave traces; burned into images, imprinted on surfaces, or imagined in memory. The traces that remain (that become remains) memorialise this past presence, and it is in attempting to preserve these moments in time that we inevitably demonstrate the impossibility of such an act of preservation: what is made more tangible is not the thing itself, but its absence.’3

Melanie Jayne’s installation echoes and resonates long after the act of viewing it, promoting an ongoing journey of possibilities and potentials.

- Sarah Edwards, 2011.

Endnotes:
1. Melanie Jayne Taylor, 2011
2. Kirsten Swenson, 2010 on Wolfgang Tillmans. cited Art in America, June/July 2010
3. Chris Handran, 2001 for Susan Fereday, After image (I Am What Remains)