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Ambiguous Images
Mairtín Crawford visits the Ormeau Baths
Gallery to look at the work of photographer Victor Sloan
Photographer Victor Sloan has become known as something of an
ambiguously critical chronicler of the Orange Order and the
marching season although, as the current exhibition at the Ormeau
Baths Gallery in Belfast shows, there is a lot more to him than
that.
Born
in Dungannon in 1945 Sloan studied at the Belfast College of Art
and has been exhibiting in various places for the past 20 years.
Selected Works 1980-200 is the first major exhibition to explore
the whole range of his photographic practice, representing work
from 18 exhibitions.
From
even the earliest work it is clear that Sloan avoids the
photo-realism approach so often associated with photographic
representations of the North, instead opting for a more
experimental approach. The photographs are often scratched,
treated with tints, inks and gouache, cropped and blown up out of
proportion. Often separate images are overlaid on one another,
where ghostlike, amorphous shapes and people contest for space
(and meaning). The effect is disconcerting, hinting at confusion,
chaos and the shifting, subjective nature of interpretation.
His
exhibition Zoo, 1983, emerged from a family trip to Belfast Zoo.
What were intended to be family snapshots of a day out ended up as
a series of disconcerting, claustrophobic pictures of, mainly,
chimpanzees. The pictures tell a sad story of displacement and
alienation: monkeys trapped behind panes of Perspex, themselves
scratched and covered with graffiti, smeared with ice cream. This
is replicated in the images where Sloan disrupts the conventional
aesthetics of the form: the subjects, in this case the chimps, are
hard to see. Sloan is clearly redefining the notion of the truth
of the camera.
Reflection on the Zoo images Sloan says “Someone once told me that
you can tell a lot about a society by the state of its zoo.” This
clearly shows a social conscience at work, made evident again in
another earlier series, Vietnamese Boat People. The photographs,
mainly silver gelatin prints treated with toner and watercolour,
are dark, eerie, sometimes disturbing. Displacement and isolation
are again to the fore here as Sloan takes us on a journey through
the new home - Craigavon - of the immigrants. Another exhibition,
Craigavon, explores this further, using the notion of the new town
to explore questions of identity and belonging in the town
planners’ dream gone wrong.
The
idea of photographic representation is further compromised and
deconstructed in Moving Windows, a travelogue of non-images taken
from inside the photographer’s car as he navigates the physical,
and by implication, political and emotional, landscape of the
North. Subject is relegated to the point of non-existence and the
idea of photographer as observer becomes central throwing up ideas
relating to surveillance and study - secret images taken in the
dark, the rain, where nothing is really discernable beyond the
windscreen (a lens?).
The
work relating to the Orange Order and associated marches and
rituals, is quietly critical but from the point of exasperation,
not from an opposing ideological position. Marchers are seen
walking through terrain that is deliberately obfuscated with the
use of heavy scratches on the prints along with paint and toners,
suggesting the idea of the past as a jail or trap. Images are
superimposed one on another, subjects are placed in contradictory
positions and the overall impression is relics of the past
parading back into the past. The heavy scratching define physical
space , almost like bars in a cage - faces are obfuscated,
territory and place indeterminate. In later images which depict
the Drumcree stand-off violence is perpetrated onto photographic
paper reflecting the violence already visited upon the subjects:
burnt out houses, empty graffiti covered bus shelters, ruined
tarmacadam, heavy security.
Sloan’s work
is impressive in both its technical approach to the
whole aesthetic notion of the photographic image and in its
range. It both disrupts and redefines the notion of the camera as
arbiter of truth while successfully allowing the deconstructed
subject to act as both moral and political art. Pertinently it
questions our perceptions and quietly encourages us to redefine
our entire world view.
Mairtín Crawford, Fortnight, March, 2001
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