Roughly two years before the iPhone came out. Five years before Instagram launched, and twenty years as I write this text. Harrow, March 31st 2005… refers to the date that Kodak ceased production of photographic film in the UK. At its peak, the Harrow factory employed over 6,000 employees, eventually closing in 2016. In conjuring this moment, the exhibition title frames a defining shift from analogue to digital. In this time, photography has become increasingly computational, fugitive and networked. In convening these artists, the exhibition asks: what is lost in the rush towards a visual environment that emphasises immediacy, convenience, and abundance? In looking slowly, what and how might we see differently?
Harrow, March 31st 2005… reflects on archives and photography. Some works adopt archival and photographic approaches; others are more material and embodied. The diaristic title suggests an intimate and everyday encounter, with artworks on a scale close to the human body. Artists weave, paint, carve, cut, collage, cast, pleat and print, imbuing their work with artistic conversations and familial anecdotes. Partially abstract but never fully, subjects and narratives are inferred.
From intervening in the family album, casting familiar childhood items, to tangentially evoking artistic antecedents and friendship, artworks embrace personal cosmologies and transform incidental iconographies. The artists in the exhibition understand that looking is an embodied, citational, and unreliable act. Seeing is material and social, refracted by memory and freighted by experience.
Text: George Vasey