Split between two venues, PINK Spaces and Rogue Studios, Interim welcomes everyone. The upcoming exhibition brings together a broad range of emerging photographic practices. Interim’s intention is to intervene; to force a pause just as projects have begun. What happens when you start with the end in mind?
An exhibition gives art a new dimension. If photographs can’t exist as their own objects, what happens when you place them back into reality, confronted with an audience? Exhibitions like Interim are the opportunities that photography needs if it wants to be relevant to the world it steals from
As an art student, university really pushes my creativity. But what is a creative person?
Surely not only art school elitists, maybe not even people who make real art, since art has become so complicated. Photographers have long been called cheaters when compared to painters and sculptors. A photograph is a sort of paste copied from reality, and isn’t comparable to traditional art technology. Photography makes a strong claim to being ‘reality’, yet a photograph is never real or true; and compared to other art disciplines, it stands out as a medium that disregards the imagination. If photography isn’t a close enough documentation of reality, apparently it isn’t a truly creative one either.
But what about the artists paying for an education in photography? Why do they think so hard on material culture? As a photography student myself, I thought the upcoming Interim exhibition could become a useful answer to some of these questions, and perhaps the perfect opportunity to keep practices critical as well as creative.
In conversation with student photographer, Tom Hardy
Carmen: Interim feels like an opportunity to ask ourselves what the study of photography means, which is a complicated and hard-to-answer question for creatives still trying to establish themselves. Where is your work situated leading up to the Interim exhibition?
Tom: “I’m constantly curious of space and its documentation, whether it’s a part of our surroundings or within us as individuals. When photography slows things down enough, everything collapses, and time reaches much further and deeper. For me, photography has become that medium to observe things through. I especially shoot analogue photography and consider the photographic object somewhat of a cultural token, staring right at the overseen things that have come to shape my world. Whether you think of the photograph as mirror or a window, it’s not so different”.
“Leading up to Interim, it all still feels like a work-in-progress, I’m spending more time than ever trying to find a balance between perfectionism and creativity. Exhibitions take a lot of refinement and, just as ever, each time I think I’ve found something to say, solutions present me with new questions”.
Carmen: The materiality of things feels important to you, and this interplay between space and time that you talk about intrigues me. Interim demands a physical outcome. How do you push conceptual studies into material? Do exhibitions like interim resolve anything?
Tom: “It’s strange aligning a creative practice with curriculum and keeping something so moving confined. It can be a long process of seeking and catching inspiration, sometimes you must redefine yourself, and then lose it again once more. It’s funny how we’re supposed to be graduating, as if this will be the only conclusion we need”.
“That is not the case for my course mates. Exhibitions are a sort of illusion of an ending, because creative practice has come to constitute who we are, and it doesn’t function with beginnings and endings. Exhibitions like Interim are an opportunity to justify photography, and materiality is our most important tool. Of course I could just talk about everything I know with you, but material culture speaks to you more. The things that we make shape more of who we are, from our homes to our phones. Photography can be such a literal depiction of how art is simultaneously inward and outward facing”.
Interim is a crucial opportunity to open the community up to others. The photography course embraces diversity, encouraging everything from photographic abstraction to documentary, representing something within each of us. Manifesting ideas to the point of display has become an important lesson. It has taught us to not fear restriction or to stop trying. If you devote your reading being onto photography, it will confer being back to you, as if you were watching outside through a window or staring at your reflection in a mirror.
Interim will take place on 20 February 2025 at Rogue Studios 3pm-5pm and at PINK Spaces 6pm-9pm
