Grahame Lynch is a multi-disciplinary artist whose body of work is rooted in lifelong conditions of visual disability. His work often encourages audiences to engage in ways that challenge their own visual and spatial perceptions, as well as their emotional connections to sight.
"The Logic of Subduction," an exhibition that travelled internationally from 2011 through 2014, addressed the expectation of eventual blindness. Centred around the task of reading, this multi-layered sculpture and video installation provided a visceral sense of the artist's personal experience while evoking reactions to the anticipation and experience of catastrophic loss. Throughout the exhibition, various pieces contained phrases that were repeatedly etched into the surface of books, cut from pages, and transferred onto walls. The audience could not, however, rely on their prior knowledge of how to read and were instead tasked with making their own sense of a seemingly chaotic yet poetically ordered experience.
In a recent body of work entitled "Being. Neither here nor there," thousands of photos were taken on buses, trains, subways, and in airports over the course of three years. During the pandemic, the act of shooting was replaced by the practice of looking for resonant moments in the unprocessed photos. Intersections and crowds took on new significance, as did situations where people dissolved into their environments. Themes of immediacy, delay, and agitation emerged within frenetic compositions of shifting locations and people enacting their own transience.
In 2023, a new body of work entitled "of breath and water" was begun. This ongoing series consists of rain-drenched self-portraits along with fragmented images of waves and skies that promised a deluge. These images, which appear to be simultaneously forming and unforming, were created using an assemblage of negatives from numerous and often conflicting moments. They might be interpreted as endless internal conversations, chaotic yet willfully quiet moments, or as a metaphorical experience of drowning. For the artist, they evoke panic but also suggest attempts to quell a situation that is not wholly apparent in the images. In this series, the subject matter and medium have departed from previous bodies of work that were made in direct response to visual disabilities, however, these new images remain self-reflexive and seek to connect with viewers on an emotional level.
In “of breath and water” cyanotype has been used as a water-borne and physical image-making process. The works play with cyanotype’s capacity to both record and obscure while flaws and imperfections have been embraced as integral parts of the images. As the series expands, multiple exposures, methods of oxidation, and the addition of pigments are being explored to create a greater sense of depth and tonality.
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