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Y vio Dios que era bueno 2024
And God saw that it was good
Ironically, this phrase from Genesis might be the first quality certification in History. Now, we are experiencing a moment defined by a lack of fundamentals. There is no stable basis on which to build our reality. We are in free fall. This disorientation implies the loss of a fixed horizon and the advent of a new elevated point of view that provides a lucid panorama of the current problems.
Reproducing this hierarchical vision, the project conceives an adulterated space which acts as an amplifier of a world governed by commercial enterprises, where the democratic order has dissolved and society is in the grip of digital technologies.
By eliminating the architectural elements and environmental references, the conventional relationships between space, time and the different elements that appear, are altered. We are in a place populated by tiny beings whose hollow shadows rush and unfold to a dimension in which we have lost our own will and our capacity for action. We live in a state of complete and utter confusion. Our existence is already a simulation that unfolds on a stage where normality gives way to the absurd, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.
*Project text: Iván del Rey de la Torre
Natural Artifice Exhibition
Glass Tank Gallery, Oxford Brookes University
February 2018
Curated by Entreentre
A group exhibition exploring how naturalistic and illusionistic representations influence the construction and understanding of reality. Aims to develop an understanding of what it means when photography has become the vehicle through which we learn about and disseminate knowledge, experience, and aspirations of our shared reality. "Natural Artifice" is about the truth hidden deep within illusions and under the skin of visual deceit, it’s about the simultaneously absurd and indispensable reliance on a consistent and trustworthy image of reality to navigate through.
At the exhibition a limited edition screen printed pamphlet is available. The pamphlet, designed by John Phillip Sage and printed by Entreentre Press, features text by Neil Bennun, Sam Lynch and Frederik Petersen as well as images from the exhibition.
In Vegue's work a long lens is used to isolate sections of the ground in a generic city square. Involuntarily, agents become erratic actors as they stray across Vegue's rectangular cone of vision. The camera acts as a stationary eye impatiently waiting for something to activate the spatial depth it records. Vegue's cropping and isolation of reality combined with a careful sequential framing creates a record of moments where the photographer's role as an observer is overtaken by his capacity for actively interpreting incongruous events as if they were connected.
Frederik Petersen, curator of the exhibition.
