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Colin Glen was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1968. He trained in Art/Art History at Goldsmith's College, London (BA) and in Art History at Birkbeck College, London (MA).
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Colin Glen's work is concerned with the relationship between experience and memory. His photographs, paintings and video work deal with the translations involved in presenting ideas through form.
The piece shown here is titled 'Suspender-beyond/behind', 2003. It consists of a hand printed cibachrome photograph. It is editioned at 5"x4"(12), 24"x20"(12)and 5'x4'(12)
The Suspender project
The Suspender project is concerned with the relationship between the found object and its (photographic) documentation. The subject was chosen for its apparent simplicity (a commonly seen object - rusty old mattress springs) but actual complexity - the broken grid of springs creates an infinite variety of shapes and patterns in relation to the angle and movement of looking. The first photographic document was a video piece that attempted to sketch out the relation of movement to the complexity of the patterns. Three still images were chosen from the video; the first being a single round of a spring, the second being a double round and the third being the multiple round of the springs. The basis for this was the process of organic growth; the bifurcation of cells that burst into complex life forms. Following on from the display of the video still images a series of paintings were performed and experiments with photographic documentation were extended, resulting in an edition of cibachrome prints at 5’x4’, 20”x24“ and 5“x4“. The image that were produced have moved way from direct reference to the original subject matter. At this stage the viewer is lead into reading other connotations into the image. As the eye attempts to find a reference point or a structure in the patterns - one is conscious of the habits and patterns of movements and behaviour. The dark rings become traces of memory - of mental journeys - stains, bodily smears, on a ‘tabula rasa’ of an original conception or preconceived approach. There is a curious sense of bodily presence in these circularities that cannot help but throw up a reference to the original form of the mattress and its role in holding the body in a state of suspension. The iron oxide, the visceral red, gains its own significance and what was an attempt at pure photographic documentation has become the sullied painterly interpretation flowing with juices.
The Suspender project aims to illustrate in form the translations involved in the process of reading and looking at an object. Any simplistic critical interpretation that attempts to neatly categorise founders, effectively colliding the conceptual with the expressive. The collapsed grid of the springs can be seen to refer to the decay of the Modernist grid - the schematic order of formal aesthetics - into a (more beautiful) desecrated grid of infinite permutability that can simultaneously be completely wasteful and meaningless. The collapse of this system is not merely a loss of order or meaning , but an attempt to gain, through habits and behaviour, a more fruitful relationship with a complex, changing environments.
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