Equinox: Kate Beaugié and Cathy Rogers

A process as old as the invention of photography, photogram is a photography without camera nor negative.  Photogram has been extensively used by the early figures of the avant-garde, notably Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, and continues to be a medium of predilection for some contemporary leading photographers working today.  It is nevertheless a niche in the world of photography and has long been outdated in favour of film cameras and the digital.  The fascination, however, that such an apparently narrow medium exerts on avant-garde artists resides in the action of immediate and direct light capturing, allowing to obtain images unlike any others.

If the technique reveals forms in their bare minimum, the experimentation can go further, and capture much higher degrees of complexity.  Hence, Kate Beaugié's photograms of water encapsulate one instant of this most extraordinary molecule that defines more than any others life on the planet. In another work, a gilded cube has been used to bounce light on exposure, forging in that moment a composition of volume, perspective, and illumination. The exhibition also includes oil paintings which gives further insight into her practice.  Cathy Rogers, who is an experimental filmmaker, keeps the pulse on time when making photograms directly on 16 mm film strips. The viewer becomes an imaginary editor looking at these perfect still images through a light box.  If run in the reel of a projector it will produce completely different fragmented sequences. 

Ultimately the reason of the conjunction of these two art practices is that they both address some of the fundamentals of art, physics, and poetry, and are interested in the aesthetics that bind the three together.  If we focus on forms as they are and what they reveal, we may find better answers in looking at their simplest manifestations than in elaborated and loaded visual interpretations.  In this pursuit, art is an enhanced act of looking.  The works combine light and darkness in equal measures, and for this reason was called Equinox, which will occur on 20 March, while the exhibition is on.