FAB Curated Show, The Octagon

Artist: Annette Smith

Dates & times: opening night Friday May 28th, 6-9pm. Open Saturday May 29th - Saturday June 12th, 11am - 5pm; Sunday June 13th 11am - 3pm.

My work generally is an investigation into the nature of photography as it relates to the passage of time as lived experience. Does technology triumph over nature? What actually constitutes an image in an infinitely mutable world, and in a culture driven by images?

The work is in response to the sites of several old faded shop signs around Bath, where the narrative of the city is being slowly erased or eroded. I have located about 40 of these fossil remains from an earlier era of advertising, a time when a city like Bath would have had its own local suppliers and producers of goods and services. Some are in good condition, others are barely decipherable. Some are prominent, others are tucked away. With these ghost signs, traces of the past - though apparently superseded and largely ignored - still co-exist with the present.

The creative process involved in producing the work echoes this temporal duality. The work exploits the distant, dreamlike qualities of long exposure pinhole photographs, which have been generated with cameras made from redundant household containers and paper negatives. Initiated with technology from early in photographic history, these small images  are scanned into a computer, digitally printed and mounted onto aluminium.