Hamish Tocher - Time's New Roman

In 2009 I made work based on some sites from Imperial Rome for a series of shows in New Zealand and Australia. I was working with selected aspects of the visual remains of some specific sites, for example the border mosaics at Galla Placidia in Ravenna, or the veiled object at the centre of the fresco cycle of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. I was trying to define the meaning of the visual remains in contemporary terms, an understanding that has less to do with a sense of chronological, cumulative history and more to do with a sense of connection or recognition across time. I used the word ekphrasis, meaning a description of an artwork in a medium other than that in which it was created, as a way of trying to frame these works.

For this show at McNamara Gallery, Time’s New Roman, I wanted to release myself from the rigour of working to try and re-invent a specific site. Instead I looked once more at the idea of connection or recognition, a theme that has underpinned my work from my first show at the gallery in 2003. In my work, I have been putting images next to each other and seeking some kind of visceral reaction from the audience, the kind of sense of sudden recognition or realignment that you might feel when you “get” the punchline of a joke. For me, it’s the sense that the two (or more) things that you are being presented with belong together, intertwine, and join up in your mental model of the world of images. I think it’s less about old set against new, about one thing preceding another, than it is about making a pair or a set where each image speaks to the others. I see the work in this show as a device for setting up, for your consideration, a number of these conjunctions, connections and moments of potential recognition.

In the last decade, analogue photography has become the nearly exclusive preserve of artists and high-end professional photographers, and the business empire that analogue-based photographic manufacturers ruled over has crumbled. Part of my concern in this show is to consider this moment in photography’s history. It could be suggested that there’s a connection between the era of the decline of analogue and the end of the Roman Empire era with which I am engaged. Partly, this is about nostalgia; but, for me, it’s as false a nostalgia for the great days of analogue (which I’m too young to have known) as it is false nostalgia for a glorious and seemingly eternal Rome which I doubt ever existed as we imagine it. What, or rather who, really did exist were the people of that era, the portrait makers and the people who sat for their portraits, the artists, grave-diggers, and their clients.

In this show, and in other work, I am trying to offer a connection between us and them, the them of other times and places, and particularly a connection to the work that they left behind, a sense that it is, in a peculiar way, part of contemporary practice. My interest is in portraiture and the face, and the sense of recognition and curiosity that people feel when they look at faces from the past.

Photographic theorists from Barthes to Batchen have written about the intimation of mortality that photography provides: and in the strictly photographic images in this show, entangled as they are with images of people who are long dead, the old moral of the vanitas lurks, warning that life lasts no longer than the click of a shutter. But don’t despair! I’ve been so charmed to discover (but why should I be surprised?) the sweet and kind messages Romans left for their dead, engraved on tombs. You will find a few of these inscriptions in Latin and English in this show. “The skies open for you”, says one. “May you sleep without a care”, says another.

Event listed by 190wic

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