After

After brings together the work of artists who recurrently use the found photographic image, whether analogue or digital. In their engagement with the found image, these artists’ works touch on the subject of loss: from the familial, to the environmental, to the social and political.

In the late 70s and early 80s, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Hervé Guibert and others were pointing towards photography’s inherent link with lost time, the photograph described as a “vestige” of that which “has been”. Before and since, artists from the Surrealists to John Stezaker to Tacita Dean have appropriated the found photograph in a bid to explore our relationship to images of the past.

In a post-pandemic, pre-apocalyptic, digital era, the way we encounter the world and its reproductions is rapidly changing. As the ice sheets melt, the screen supplants human to human contact and analogue technologies die out, the artists in this exhibition harness the found image to reflect on what “has been”, whilst artfully transmuting what remains. A dialogue between historical and contemporary modes of looking and image/object-making occurs between and within works, including traditional and digital printmaking, analogue photography and screenshots taken from Google Earth.

The use of a found image in an artwork indexes the research undergone in the process of the artwork’s creation. All of the works in this show uncover and articulate the poetics of artistic research; the found image positioned as the central site through which varying concerns and processes are explored and enacted.