exhibition

White Noise

Dan Holdsworth

01.Jun.07 - 07.Jul.07
Wed-Sat 11-6 or by appt

Store
27 Hoxton St
London N1 6LP
020 7729 8171
info@storegallery.co.uk
www.storegallery.co.uk
Tube Old Street; Bus 242, 243, 149, 67, 26, 141, Shoreditch / Hoxton

“Nature has forgotten us,” laments Hamm mournfully in Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Endgame’. Clov, his companion, replies: “There is no more nature.” Culture’s hijacking of nature is a subject of contemporary anxiety but it is not a new phenomenon: all landscapes touched by human intervention are shaped inevitably by a process of acculturation. Over time, and change, they accrue symbolic meanings that have been explored by artists who have read landscape as a testament to human progress, destruction, conflict and industry. As Simon Schama argues in ‘Landscape and Memory': “Landscapes are culture before they are nature: constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock."

Dan Holdsworth's recent body of work, ‘White Noise' invokes arcadia as a long-failed ideal transformed by technology for better and for worse. Holdsworth performs a balancing act between visual seduction and the unsettling implications of the technological phenomena that he portrays. A range of antennae in a snow-bound field is formally perfect and yet the neat rows gesture towards a synchronized destruction of what was once pristine. A half-built motorway viaduct soars majestically whilst brutally dominating the valley around it. Holdsworth obsessively returns to sites that once signified pre-history such as mountains, fields and coastlines, but which are now being reconfigured by a technology that steadily and unstoppably possesses them. Technology is an impersonal machine territorializing without prejudice or discernment: it is the ultimate leveler; mocking borders, forcing migration, driving capital.

‘White Noise' is a series of 8 photographs, presented for the first time at STORE between 31 May and 30 June 2007. Holdsworth is exhibiting in ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain' at Tate Britain (22 May to 2 September). He will also be exhibiting in anniversary celebrations at both the ICA and the V&A this year.