Peter Newman-Subterranean Blues

Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music’ – Goethe

Rebecca Lidert, the director of CNB Gallery, is delighted to present Subterranean Blues, an exhibition of new photographs by the British artist Peter Newman.

The show is comprised of eight large-scale works that appear, at first glance, like planets suspended in a pitch-black universe. However, closer inspection reveals them to be depictions of city streets taken from the ground up. Dramatic and mesmerizing in equal measure, they form part of Newman’s long-term Metropoly project, which connects to earlier serial and typological photography, such as the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German artists who methodically recorded the mechanical structures of the industrial age.

In these works Newman examines a wide spectrum of architecture from across the globe, revealing the character of a city and the way it frames the sky. Modernist structures, such as those of Mies van der Rohe, frequently appear. As do contemporary buildings that also invoke the future. Due to the panoptic nature of the lens used by the artist – it was originally invented for astronomy to observe atmospheric phenomenon – slight changes in position radically alter what appears in view. Consequently, the process emphasizes a physical relationship to the world and requires searching for the precise vantage point from where everything falls into place, and the time at which to record it. All the elements combine to form a total landscape.

For this exhibition the gallery, which is located in the basement of a former Victorian tramshed, has been painted an intense deep blue, lending the photographs an environment evocative of a journey to another place or element. A quiet hum of science fiction envelops the show. Indeed, the space is reimagined as a vehicle itself, with the circular photographs as portholes to distant places. The atmosphere of being underground could equally be sub-marine, aboard a ship or an off-world station.

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.” – Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

While the photographs are predominantly urban, an intriguing counterpoint is created in two of the eight works – one of an ancient redwood forest in California, and the other of the Eden Project in Cornwall. While both are viewed from the same perspective as the cityscapes, their presence suggests a way that cities might be developed in the future.

In the cinematic imagining of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick chose an ultra wide optic to represent the all-seeing eye of HAL, the sentient computer. In this context, the exhibition offers a progression of views as seen by an animate Spaceship Earth.