"""MaRtIn UsBoRnE"""

martinusborne.com

I was once left in a car at a young age. I don’t know when or where or for how long, possibly at the age of four, perhaps outside Tesco’s, probably for fifteen minutes only. The details don’t matter.  The point is that I wondered if anyone would come back: in a child’s mind it is possible to be alone forever.
Around the same age I began to feel a deep affinity with animals – in particular their plight at the hands of humans. I remember watching TV and seeing footage of a dog being put in a plastic bag and being kicked. What appalled me most was that the dog could not speak back. It’s muteness terrified me.
I should say that I was a well-loved child and never abandoned and yet it is clear that both these experiences arose from the same place deep inside me: a fear of being alone and unheard. Perhaps this is a fear we all share at some level.
The images in this series explore that feeling, both in relation to myself and to animals in general. The camera is the perfect tool for capturing a sense of silence and longing: the shutter freezes the subject for ever and two layers of glass are placed between the viewer and the viewed: the glass of the lens, the glass of the picture frame and, in this instance, the glass of the car window further isolates the animal. The dog is truly trapped.
When I started this project I knew the photos would be dark. What I didn’t expect was to see so many subtle reactions by the dogs: some sad, some expectant, some angry, some dejected. It was as if upon opening up a box of grey-coloured pencils I was surprised to see so many shades inside.
I hope that these pictures are engaging and perhaps a little amusing. I want to show that there is life in the dark places within us.
I will stop writing now and you can stop reading. Words can only get us so far. After all, we are all animals.

_-_ Wendy Mcmurdo _-_

wendymcmurdo

Wendy McMurdo was born in Edinburgh in 1962. She studied fine art painting at Edinburgh College of Art. In the mid 1980's she studied at the Pratt Institute in New York and completed her M.A at Goldsmiths College in London in 1993, when she was awarded a Henry Moore Foundation Research Fellowship. From 1998-2000 she was appointed Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. Recent commissions include the Science Museum in London and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh in association with the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh.
In 2001 the Centre for Photography in Salamanca, Spain published a monograph 'Wendy McMurdo' with essays by Francis McKee and Gilda Williams. Her work, and writings on her work, are included both in Phaidon's recent 'Art and Photography' and Thames and Hudson's 'Photography and Art' from the World of Art series. Her practice has been the subject of documentaries for BBC 2 and Channel 4 and is included in The British Library Sound Archive's Oral history of British Photography.
Wendy McMurdo currently lives and works in Edinburgh and is represented by the Andrew Mummery Gallery, London. Her work has been included in group exhibitions and public collections throughout the UK and overseas.

^^:: Tom Hunter ::^^

 

 

 

Since 1997, Tom Hunter has turned his camera on his surrounding neighbourhood of Hackney, showing empathy without being polemic. He is known for a remarkable blend of political commentary, history of art and the technicalities of photography. Each of these elements exists in his recent commissioned exhibition, 'Living in Hell and Other Stories' at The National Gallery. The resulting photographs present a dark, bleak and miserable Hackney. Perhaps indicative of such a prestigious commission - the museum's first in photography - Hunter tries to do too much in his new works.

tomhunter 

^^_Youssef Nabil_^^

 

Youssef Nabil observes his life as if he were in a cinema, watching and witnessing every minute of his own movie. He is fascinated by the idea that in cinematic stories the actors are playing a game in which nothing is real, and if they die in the film they don't actually die in real life. When he realised, as a child, that many of his favourite Egyptian film stars were no longer alive, this kindled a desire to meet those who were still alive and to immortalise them for himself, before they die or before he dies. In so doing, he has created an imaginary reality that reflects both the paradoxes of the Middle East in our times as well as the fantasies and flamboyance of Egyptian movie stars in the cosmopolitan pre-revolutionary years in Cairo.

Nabil began his photography career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his friends acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Later in the 1990s, while working as a photographers' assistant in prominent studios in New York and Paris, he began photographing artists and friends, producing both formal portraits as well as placing his subjects in the realms of dreams and sleep, on the edge of consciousness and far from their public personas. On his return to Egypt in 1999 he further developed his unique approach to hand painted photography, with portraits of writers, singers and film stars of the Arab world. In recent years, especially since settling in Paris and New York, he has started producing self-portraits that reflect his dislocated life away from Egypt. In these liminal scenes he lingers between worldly realities and serene dreams, loneliness and fame, tinged with sex and death.

Nabil's distinctive technique of hand-colouring silver gelatin photographs removes the blemishes of reality and recalls the heyday of Egyptian film. Nabil disrupts prevalent notions of colour photography and painting, as well as assumptions about the type of aesthetics associated with art and those identified with popular culture. His particular medium evokes a sense of longing and nostalgia and allows his photographs to flicker between our time and another era.

youssefnabil 

## Edward del Rosario ###

EDWARD del ROSARIO lives and works in New York City where he has been widely exhibited to
great critical acclaim. A graduate of the painting department of the University of Kansas with an advanced degree from The Rhode Island School of Design, del Rosario brings a Eur-Asian sensibility combined with a hip American take on pop culture to his paintings and drawings. A strictly figurative artist of impeccable technique and style, del Rosario's finely detailed and carefully designed works portray contemporary figures in quirky and psychologically provocative situations. The artist isolates his figures, rendered either in oil on canvas or graphite on paper, against blank grounds where they command the viewer's full attention. His drawings have the simplicity and purity of a Japanese haiku, his paintings the jewel-like finish and intensity of a Memling altarpiece.

richardhellergallery