Programming

In the two series of works presented in this exhibition, the technology used to make the images was both exposed as a process and summoned as a visual metaphor for the artist's relationship with his social and physical environment. Oriented towards the hyper-mediatization of the image, this technology (photography, video, digital image) corresponded to a process of treatment of the images where, from one medium to another, these images ended up acquiring a sort of identity of their own and irremediably freeing themselves from their initial reality.

These images were at once the support, the material and the subject of the two series proposed by Dawson. Their content and narrative were linked to the representation of the artist's identity; their arrangement through electronic-photographic landscapes became the image of the fabrication and mediatization of this identity, which oscillated undecidably between urban and rural contexts, between the synthetic and the natural, between fiction and reality.

With these two proposals, Dawson sought to articulate in a visual language his perception of what he calls his psychasthenic condition, referring to the notion of an individual's abandonment of his own identity in favor of an environment to which he eventually becomes completely assimilated. This intention resulted in rhizomatic or serial installations on the wall, in which the images assumed an identity directly attributable to the various stages of their fabrication.Certain "residues" of the media of construction accumulated in the images (the background noise of the video tape, the contrasts between the levels of resolution, etc.) and served to delimit the aspect of their conception from that of their realization. To the somewhat ambiguous "veracity" of the images were added purely fictional iconic elements. The result is an interaction effect between apparently real and fictional forms, between the real reference of the images and their construction.

James Dawson holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He has also studied photography, film and video techniques in Toronto and Mexico. Since 1992, he has exhibited in Germany, the United States, Toronto and Vancouver. He also spent time in Banff at the photography studio in 1993.