Between 20th April and 10th June 2011, the Photon Gallery presents Tales from the North, a project bringing together the works of three English artists of younger and middle generation: photographers Jonathan Olley and Stephen J. Morgan, and video artist Simon Aeppli.
Tales from the North addresses the persistence of memory and sensitivity to the effects of specific historical circumstances; and in so doing, it is interesting to note how the artists investigate the processes of collective memory formation and reflect the current situation in the North of UK. Through their selected works, as well as their artistic endeavours in general, two Anglo-Irish and a Welsh artist establish a context relevant to exploring the impacts of historical and ideological factors on the formation of the individual’s identity. In this, their attention is not diverted by such issues as the contemporary politics of Anglo-Irish relations, or national historical discourse, but they instead share a common interest in personal (family) history, and that of the particular environments they refer to in their works or periods marking their lives. The question raised by the project is the ability to treat a delicate personal, historical or national topic in an engaged and simultaneously subtle way, and how this is addressed by these young British artists.
Poet W.H. Auden said that “we can neither repeat our past nor leave it behind”. Recalling and evoking the past, images telling “this is the way it was”; this is actually the principal function of Photography. As to the process of remembrance and oblivion through photographic images, Roland Barthes once even used the phrase “emanation of past reality”. Indeed, the works of three artists in the Tales from the North address the question as to how collective (historical) memory is “emanated” or reflected in defining individual identities. Remembrance has different forms: it might be the “Proustian” search of lost time through “pieces of the present” as is the case with Morgan, or more rational strategies of evocation and preservation such as Jonathan Olley’s topographic and typological study of the changes to Ulster’s urban landscape in Castles of Ulster. Simon Aeppli deals with the “objectification of memory” through diary entries; Aeppli’s urge to remember is clear in the title of his work In Case I Disappear. In all three pieces he symbolically keeps returning to Eden, the place of his birth, which could hardly have a more meaningful name… By focusing on particular social practices and objects from his close environment, Stephen Morgan as well constantly alludes to his youth, his own memorable “paradise”.
The three artists apply various strategies in their dealing with memory. Aeppli’s and Morgan’s oeuvre is characterised by intimate diary notes, which tell their own tale or illustrate the stories of individuals in their close proximity. Thus the subject of their narrative construction is imbued with a strong emotional component, whilst the style or the use of medium to a large extent adopts the vernacular, in that their works look like home-made snapshots as one might find in a family album. The major portion of Stephen Morgan’s series – despite their apparent objective and documentary approach – deals with subjective reminiscence of his own life and close environment, whereas through image editing Aeppli sublimes his own intimate history in the metaphor of time and space. In Aeppli’s videos, which are to a large extent a collage of existing images, family photos, diary notes, documents, cuttings and sections, Morgan’s “snapshot” is substituted by actual vernacular material.