Joe Clark

The Blue of the Distance, 2012
Steel, projectors, slides, electronics, micro-controller, bike components, tarpaulin, ice
Courtesy Workplace Gallery

Deep Space, 2012
Steel, Scotchlite
Courtesy Workplace Gallery

Photography is a major locus of Joe Clark‘s practice. Since completing his first degree in Newcastle in 2004, Clark (b. 1982) has pursued an investigation into his relationship with it and how it can be a vehicle for his personal language; balancing a curiosity about the nature of the indexical image- its power and authority in contemporary visual culture- with what he has come to think of as a kind of ‘ritualistic singularity’. In his work, Clark promotes the reception of a sublime, which purposely fails to stand up to the scrutiny of the viewer because the works contain references to their status as constructs.

Completing a Masters at the Slade School in 2010 allowed Clark to extend his formal investigations into Installation, sculpture and CGI as a way of unpacking the making of images in culture and their relationship to lived experience. Actual photography has taken a temporary back seat as he follows his interest towards exploring a tension between the experience of pictorial space and that of actual space. Alongside this, Clark is keen to explore the idea that beneath his photographs there is a language- what does this look like when freed from the photographic support?

Broadly speaking, the work is located at the intersection of a romantic spiritualism and an enlightenment rationalism; an urgent truth and a sly contrivance; ideological certainty and an atomised society. Clark proposes a vision that is romantic and hopeful but is trapped in things that seem sadly ambivalent about their relationship to reality.

See also: www.joeclark.eu, www.workplacegallery.co.uk/artists