Between Two Views | Carl Warner
22 January - 7 February 2021
Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Carl Warner's latest exhibition Between Two Views, showing from 22 January - 7 February 2021. Please RVSP below to attend the exhibition's opening, Sunday 24th January from 4 - 6 pm. We welcome you to visit the gallery, Wednesday to Saturday 10am - 5pm & 11- 4pm Sunday.
A mirror allows us to see the impossible. The simplest expression of this impossibility is perhaps that with a mirror we can see ourselves and what is behind us, beyond our direct looking, all at once. In eighteenth century Britain, a particular type of compact mirror, the Claude glass, was used by artists and tourists to view and imaginatively shape the landscape into Picturesque talking points. It was such a popular activity that guidebooks advised of sites where the best views of outstanding landscapes were to be seen with the aid of the glass. The way of seeing and shaping landscape enabled by the Claude glass has numerous contemporary parallels. The mobile phone in size, shape and particular functions is the most obvious. Physically so similar, with the darkened face and fit in the hand, often protected by a protective case, today’s mobile technology does all that the original users of the glass desired. Aesthetic images made and shared in an instant through a transparent technology.
To make these works I walked one hundred miles through the Scottish Highlands and also went to the northern most point of the British Isles to the island of Unst. I was a tourist searching for views, as the earlier users of the glass, who made a familiar landscape strange in the views from their Claudes, were. Near the peak of Conic Hill overlooking Loch Lomond, I watched as people turned their back to the view to make pictures of it, unwittingly re-enacting the actions of those earlier tourists in hunt of the picturesque. The works in this series reference that pivot between two views, recto verso images that make the reduction of the real into two dimensions both obvious and problematic. The ellipse references the Claude glass in its most popular shape, a frame within a frame. They highlight a preference of one view over another, aesthetic decisions that obliterate and negate, but also raise the question: Are those views in the ellipse to the front or behind?
— Carl Warner