Spotlight
Calum Colvin
Calum Colvin ‘Natural Magic’, RSA March 2009
This exhibition brings together a series of works created over the last five years which are collectively titled ‘Natural Magic’ (after ‘Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott 1832’ by Sir David Brewster). This series of artworks explore areas of commonality between visual science and visual art, and the use of optical devices in the development of these disciplines. The artworks are presented as a series of wall-based and free-standing stereoscopic images and are an open-ended exploration of a time of great change in science, religion, nationality and our understanding of the visual world. They explore parallels between the invention and development of the stereoscopic viewer in 1838 and the development of the digital camera and (printed) digital image towards the end of the 20th century.
These works intend to develop an interaction with the image surface, challenging the viewer to decode the surface and re-examine the notion of ‘truth’. In stereo photography existence of the image as an entity in the viewers mind is purely a mental construct. Visually, the picture appears within the brain via stereo prints transmitted to the eye through the mechanism of the stereoscope. There is no surface, no conduit between print/artefact and visual experience. There is of course the stereoscope itself, the box, the mirror. However its’ relation to the perceived image is strangely tenuous, appreciated more as an object than anything else. In this sense the image is opened out, laid bare.
The freestanding mirror stereoscopes are based on Sir Charles Wheatstone’s Mirror Stereoscope (1838) and the lenticular stereoscope is based on David Brewster’s invention, which was first made in Dundee in 1849. The wall-based works are anaglyph stereo (designed to be viewed through the glasses provided), developed in 1853.
These processes are a visual conduit for a complex series of narrative images which refer throughout, in various ways, to the ephemeral nature of their existence. Various aspects of visual perception, science, philosophy, history, portraiture and identity are considered in these works and the fusing of subject and object within art/photography investigated.
Image titles, 'Portrait of Lord Byron' 2009'Chimenti' (stereo photographs) from the exhibition 'Natural Magic' 2009.
About Calum Colvin
Born in Glasgow in 1961, Calum Colvin was a winner of one of the first Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Awards. He was awarded an OBE in 2001 and is Professor of Fine Art Photography at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. Colvin’s artworks have been widely exhibited in venues as diverse as Orkney, Los Angeles and Ecuador. A practitioner of both sculpture and photography, Colvin brings these disciplines together in his unique style of 'constructed photography': assembled tableaux of objects, which are then painted and photographed. His complex compositions are rich in association and spatial ambiguities. His work is held in numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London as well as the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh and the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow.
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