Exhibition: Mediation, on the other hand, is a control function

Fran Gordon is a printmaker and image-maker working with found photographic and film sources. Her new body of work, produced in the past 6 weeks from her exchange to the University of Calgary, explores the idea of the mediated image through assembling and reassembling selected found imagery. Our heavily documented world can feel both close and distant, blurred, mirrored, unreal, and out of our control. Through intuitive and rhythmic image making, a question arises of how images can exist in digital and physical spaces, becoming both a representation and a misrepresentation of the real. Mediation, on the other hand, is a control function refers to a mechanical like approach in how we consume imagery; this repetitive abstracted motion is much like the artists approach to making through printmaking. Printmaking forms a frame for questioning to explore the very themes of the process: that of appropriation, reproduction and the multiple. I use this process in its broadest terms, sometimes relying solely on a photocopier to re-appropriate imagery. The ideas behind this body of work sit between memory and imagination. I have been exploring imagery of futures, histories and proposed places. Between these places an exploration of my own identity as Scottish and the landscape and thoughts I have toward my home, having moved from it, have too formed some of these works. The ideas of fragmentation and time have become apparent. Making tactile works with layers, censored areas and abstracted landscapes hint at our reliance on photographs, digital archives and forced time scales within technology, to experience the world and give us a sense of place. Much like our relationship with technology, the work hints at the unfinished, the undecided and the possible. There is a questioning and an overlap of different ideas to the works: home, identity, place, future and reality. Since moving to London I have been questioning the tensions of my identity as a Scottish person and where that thought exists within London post Scottish referendum. Fran Gordon lives and works in London. Gordon graduated in Communication Design from the Glasgow School of Art in 2014 and currently studies MA Printmaking at the Royal College of Art. Recent exhibitions, awards and residencies include: You will recognise its various parts, Solo Exhibition, Glasgow (2015), Stargazing, The Pier Arts Centre (2015), Hospitalfield Arts Graduate Residency Programme (2014), Grafik Magazine New Talent Feature (2014), People of Print Graduate Print Awards (2014).

Location:

Art Building – Little Gallery

Speaker:

Fran Gordon, exchange student from the Royal College of Art, London, UK.

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/exhibition-mediation-other-hand-control-function