Tasha Finn
Kim Demuth’s exhibition, Second Hand Pose: Portraits of the Unknown, was as much about the subjects of Demuth’s artworks as it was about the processes of representation. Demuth takes lost and found photographs of unknown people and remodels these images to create an illusion of three dimensional presence. Using an optical device, Demuth box mounts these images and the effect is an illusory image which hovers between two and three dimensions.
Demuth does not use lenticular printing, but rather a technique which induces a sfumato effect, intensifying the images’ relation to memory, dreams and the subconscious. Mediating between the antinomies of reality and illusion is therefore key to Demuth’s practice. His portraits remind the viewer that images, especially the perceptions they incite, are part of how we understand the world around us. More crucially, Demuth seeks to interrupt the viewer’s spontaneous responses to his artworks, which leads the viewer to question more widely the manipulating impact of images on our perception of our environments. The fact that Demuth uses emotionally evocative images, and in particular portraits which reveal human vulnerabilities, further provokes the viewer to question their impulsive responses to the images around them. By intervening in the mimetic qualities of portrait photography with illusory techniques, Demuth subtly reminds the viewer to question the automatic process of seeing and believing.
The children’s wall was foremost presented in the exhibition space. As the viewer walks into the space, they are confronted by a wall dedicated to portraits of children, with many of them possessing an antique quality. Adding to the unearthly sense of these images, all nine found photographs were digitally manipulated to give the children an ethereal quality. Contradictorily, Demuth named the children, giving the impression that the child pictured is not a digitally generated image but a person who existed. Furthermore, as the viewer approaches each portrait, they gradually become aware that the two-dimensionality of the image has been distorted so that the figure appears to float just above the surface. These interventions occurred in all the portraits in the exhibition, which leads the viewer to question what Demuth’s motives are in luring the viewer to perceive a human presence in the portraits, only to reveal their presence as an illusion.
Demuth’s works explore the morality of the human consciousness. They present both a window of reality and illusion, of faith and scrutiny. They simultaneously entice and deter the viewer and in doing so remind us that seeing is a process of judgement. Seeing is not a neutral act but a complex layering of cultural, social and ethical construction. Demuth remarks he “celebrate[s] the outer world/s by pulling it/them apart and reconstructing it in a distorted reflection of itself, that hopefully is a way of romantically dealing with the harshness of its falsehood.”
The portraits of Clive and Joe further allude to the artist’s desire to expose the prejudice of sight. Clive, standing alone in the woods dressed in 1920’s attire, complete with suspenders and slicked back hair, appears truly sinister. As unnerving as his appearance is, nothing is known of him- every judgement the viewer makes of him is speculative. However, while Clive invites speculation, Joe shuns it. All the viewer sees of Joe is his back- there is nothing about Joe which reveals his personality. Joe personifies the artist’s intentions to fracture our impulsive response to images.
When confronted by these images of the unknown in Second Hand Pose, the viewer gradually reflects upon their responses to the images which range from compassion, to unease and to the realisation that what they are seeing is a disconnected object, an image decontextualised from its original use. These images therefore contain a fusion of paradoxes, existing dually as self-reflexive objects and as reflections of externality. This compound of opposites is repeated in the hybrid nature of the images as both real, found portraits of people who existed and digitally intervened objects as reflections of our processes of judgement.
Second Hand Pose: Portraits of the Unknown was displayed at Jan Manton Art, August 4 – 28, 2010.
This article was originally published on brisbanedialogues, May 2011.
Jacina Leong 