Guy Gilmour
Quiet City
27 October – 21 November 2018
I found some black and white film negatives that I developed when doing photography at art school in the mid 70s but had never printed. So when I digitized them (stuck them on the window and photographed them again, very low tech) I found these unfamiliar images of bits of the city and bedsits I lived in then. I started turning them into paintings. This led me on to some old slides and photos from around that time and later to make the other paintings
What are they about? Time and memory in some way I suppose. Not in any specific way, except for me of course, but then even for me its the general feeling of past time rather than remembering particular events. I’ve given some of them titles from pieces of music (Quiet City – Aaron Copeland, Venus de Milo – Television, etc) to get away from the idea of particular places and people. At what point do our old photos stop being aide-mémoires or historical documents and become prompts for poetic musing or objects of aesthetic enjoyment or even any or all of the above?
