vivian cooper smith

apparition apparatus extension

26 august - 1 october 2016

We are delighted to welcome Vivian Cooper Smith back to Perth. He studied at the University of WA, graduating with First Class Honours in 1995, and he is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College for the Arts.

He has exhibited widely, most extensively in his home of Melbourne, and now regularly in Sydney where he is represented by Galerie pompom.

In recent years Cooper Smith has been exploring the materiality of photography, intervening, for example, by crumpling then re-photographing his photographs. This technique compelled the viewer to acknowledge the materiality of the image itself, and contrast it with the way we document our everyday lives with photography - photographs that usually remain in the realms of the digital world.

In his newest series of photographs, Apparition Apparatus, and this second version, Extension, he physically intervenes on the surface of the c-type photographs with a pigment pen, creating a network of small dots. These shifting patterns evoke a sense of mystery within the landscape, like an ethereal presence one can’t quite focus on. Here again, Cooper Smith is adding another dimension to his work, questioning how we see the world, and creating an engagement between the subject and the process. He stated, “this body of work explores the relationship between belief systems and the natural world. These structures for thought and knowledge are often linked to experiences of natural phenomena. Faith and imagination contrive to instill meaning, symbolism and significance to hitherto unknown or misunderstood events. Examples of these could include a solar eclipse, a rainbow, the aurora borealis or even more common occurrences like the arrival of mist or the play of light in a forest. Created by a manual application of pigment pen dots to printed photographs these images emulate the appearance of apparitions in a forest while the process of making reveals the constructed nature of the phenomena. In a way these images demonstrate our collective visions of the natural world - mediated by our human experience and the search for meaning.”

Vivian Cooper Smith’s photographs can be found in the collections of Artbank, the City of Yarra, Gippsland Art Gallery, and numerous private collections.

Quotes from the artist’s exhibition statement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vision #3 pigment pen on c-type print 72 x 100cm 2016 $3,500 framed
apparition apparatus #5 pigment pen on c-type print 75 x 50cm 2016 $2,400 unframed sold	apparition apparatus #6 pigment pen on c-type print 75 x 50cm 2016 $2,400 unframed
apparition apparatus #7 pigment pen on c-type print 75 x 50cm 2016 $2,400 unframed	spellbound #5 pigment pen on c-type print 60 x 40cm 2016 $2,300 framed
vision #4 pigment pen on c-type print 72 x 100cm 2016 $3,500 framed sold
intervention #1 pigment pen on c-type print 30 x 20cm 2016 $550 unframed	intervention #2 pigment pen on c-type print 30 x 20cm 2016 $550 unframed