Darren Almond ...between here and the surface of the moon (Rare edition)

Rare & Collectible

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition of Darren Almond's exhibition ..between here and the surface of the moon at FRAC Auvergne, France in 2011.

Darren Almond's serial photographs are riveting due to their irrational luminosity and unrealistic precision. Their impact chiefly stems from their striking beauty, which often divulges the tragic essence of sites with a fraught history. Almond's landscapes fascinate because they kindle perception by deftly juxtaposing precision and blurriness, brightness and darkness, foreground and background, stillness and motion. This virtuoso interplay, and the travel scenes from regions that are often faraway and barely accessible, make us wonder about the persistence of a genre which, beyond the landscape tradition, nowadays implies romantic aspiration, as well as a view of nature that is touristic, documentary and political.

However, in practice, the allure of Almond's artwork transcends the overt splendour of the views. It transpires in the artist's underlying method, which is aesthetically fuelled by the exploration of time. How might an artist, in this day and age, depict temporality? What are the methods and means for visually representing the notion and experience of time? The answer resides in Almond's distinct and complementary practices, which involve time in various guises: retransmitted, distorted, delayed, real, subjective or frozen. These 'times' are conveyed through the various exposure lengths of certain photo series: one minute for Faroe Islands, 15 minutes for Fullmoon. They also take shape by way of films, which Almond elaborates in parallel or simultaneously to his photographs, thus contrasting the silence and deliberate pictorialism of landscapes with the noise (sometimes saturated) and predetermined duration of documentaries. Finally, they are embodied by artefacts that involve duration and travel. Almond has a penchant for warping such devices, which include digital clocks, license plates, road signs, bus shelters and blade fans. In addition to denoting different eras of industrial society, these
objects are rendered incongruous through their size or function, and thus look like part of a décor that is absurd, and yet temporally and historically significant.