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| From July 1999, until
July 2001, images were culled from daily media sources. These images were
carefully selected with an emphasis on cultural, political and sporting
events. Randomly, these images were paired and then affixed to common note-paper.
Over these pages, once again randomly, words and phrased were scrawled,
chosen from Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud (New Directions). "Illumination"
is the first term applied to the photographic image, hence the title, appropriated,
for this subject.
These pages of images with text were then "cut-up" in the chance method described by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in The Third Mind (John Calder), and other writings. Pages of images once reduced to an almost contextless state of colour and signs, a further chance method of selecting was used as an editing device, this as a means to re-impose an aesthetic and a sense of coherence, while stimulating alternate readings of the images and text, with new images appearing. In form and substance. To fix these images and readings a basic grid pattern was used, and the pieces affixed to this. The end result may be a colourful mosaic but it is not a puzzle: there is no macro-image. The pages read more as a narrative stream. Two years (the six months either side of the year 2000 serve as brackets to that central moment) of Millennium events (momentum and resolve) are embedded in these grids which contain both narrative and subtext, witht he lines from Arthur Rimbaud's poems srving as historical marker (they were composed, in a frenzy on the cusp of the Twentieth Century and mark the birth of Modernism). The objective of this project is to offer a summary of, and a means of interpretation to a recent and significant period of time. |