On a day trip for afternoon tea at the Hilton, I stopped off at the Maureen Paley Gallery by Bethnal Green station after seeing an advertisement in Art Review for the exhibition of the work of Morgan Fisher titled Past Present, Present Past. The exhibition caught my interest because it was a photograph of an old film box, the title as well intrigued me. As I was looking into film photography at the time, as well as looking through old photographs and what they mean to us, the exhibition seemed to be key for my research for this module.
We went up to the gallery on the Monday, after finding it was closed we rang the bell and a member of staff ushered us in and switched the entire exhibition on for us. I was pleasantly surprised as they went to a lot of trouble to allow us to have a walk around the exhibition. I liked the gallery space, the ground floor consisted of a room with a film playing on repeat inside. The first floor was a white space with a series of photographs of old films around the room, a second room came off this which had another film inside.
The first film titled Red Boxing Gloves/ Orange Kitchen Gloves I found at first relatively difficult to understand. It was obvious that one was feminine and the other masculine but it was difficult to figure out what was significant about the difference here. After picking up the handout that went with the exhibition, Fisher wrote that the glove films are in the form of a pendent pair; usually two paintings with subjects that compliment each other. Exploring the idea of man and the woman in this case, the male the large boxing gloves and the female the washing up gloves. After reading this the work appealed to me a lot more, it seems quite sexist but I guess thats just how I read the piece. I was looking for something from the work and this is what I pulled from it.
The first floor of the space consisted of a series of photographs all around the room, positioned exactly in a line. From the initial advertisement that I saw I thought that there might be other things in the exhibition other than just old films, however each picture was of an old film. Morgan Fishers writing on the work explained how the films were now out of date, could not be used, and many of the brands were no longer in production. He talks of how the films used to carry a promise of the future, but now they are useless. They are film images, that were scanned and printed, which links with what he states about how film photography as an amateur practice is virtually extinct, it is left only to the professionals. What I liked about the work was what the individual images mean. This is something I have always found fascinating about photography and art in general. Significance is given back to these old films when they have been photographed, and staged in this way. The artist has taken these films and almost said, these right here are important, don’t forget them. There’s something about this that really interests me, how art and photography can make even the simplest of things seem important.
The final film was titled Production Footage this was in the smaller room off of the main gallery space. The film consisted of documenting old film movie cameras, again I believe the idea of this film was to show that this old process has not been forgotten. Like the other works, by using the very techniques that are documented in the exhibition, the artist is going against the idea of old cameras and films being neglected. I enjoyed the show although it was very small and not what I expected. It was good to read the piece written by Morgan Fisher about the work because that made it much more clearer about what the work was about, it just goes to show how important it is for an artist to write about their work.
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