27 March - 25 April 1999
Photographs are often talked of as shards of frozen time. Temporal condensing chambers enumerating indefatigable moments, or a particular object. A rhetorical out take. By becoming distinct in itself and classifiable through chemical instanteneity, the photograph was able to join to critical discourse an interface of its own making. An interface that the gaze borrowed from the eye, which it took from the world, then gave back to it. A mechanical parenthesis that somehow merges empiricism with idealism and yet still remains philosophically irreducible. As such, photography has always been notoriously hard to write about, that's why there are so few books on it.
A common duality in photography is the presence of absence - the abyss, vanitas, Lacan et al and a veracity of phenomonology. Something like a masquerade that seeks to undo the evidence of the world. A referent degree zero. Double mimesis builds on the origin of the subject's desire to know, which means putting oneself into a certain relation to it. Putting oneself in a position that feels like knowledge, or potency. Though, even a faculty like 'ironic still life'- nature morte - isn't able to talk fully of such spaces. Fortunately for photography, unlike painting, it doesn't have to reinvent itself.
For her solo exhibition, Anna Mossman has presented an image printed from two sandwiched transparencies of the same object from the same perspective, taken a minute apart.
