Pieces of String

By David Farrell

Every day I walk 10-12 km with our dog. Sometimes a little less. Sometimes a little more. He has a formidably good name. Indefatigably, my third shadow, he can be a clown, but he has the sensitivity of a poet. Sometimes simultaneously. These are things I strive for in myself but fail miserably at achieving. I also walk habitually with my first shadow, but some days it stays invisible. It is nurtured by light, somewhat like myself. I live with a remarkable woman. She is my second shadow – xxx. These photographs, this choreography of incontinent looking, arise mostly from these few threads. Of course, when one says looking, one also means thinking and feeling, and working with uncertainty and the subliminal thoughts of a wandering mind. In addition, to quote the singer Celeste, I have ‘different weathers in my brain’. Their seasonality determines what situations acquire a frame around them. This happens not only while out walking with a dog named Click but then, often much later, when birthing and scaling them. The concept of a photograph existing and not existing has enveloped me of late, but that is for another time.

I came to photography in my mid-twenties through a gnawing, existential sense of the ephemeral, transient nature of existence. Big Stuff, eh? The notion, desire, or more accurately, the hunger, though perhaps naïve, to leave a tangible trace of existence in my wake pecked away at my psyche. I needed a trace that could and would exist physically outside myself then and in the future. Perhaps it was the medium’s meditation on time, life, and death that was the rhizome for my future self. That’s a nice metaphor. A rhizome is a modified subterranean plant stem that sends roots and shoots from its nodes, and the shoots grow upwards from dark to light. That’s a life of making photographs. A life seeking questions rather than answers, ambiguities rather than hard facts.

Perhaps fortuitously, a rhizome is also a concept in post-structuralism that describes an assemblage that allows connections between any of its constituent elements, regardless of any predefined ordering, structure, or entry point. This is very apt for how I now try to work with photography, but let’s not spoil this with academia.

When we walk, Click and I look at many things together, and I suspect we see them quite differently. His perspective is definitely more grounded, and his observations truly are the Memories of a Dog. Mine, on the other hand, feels like a slipstream. A series of wake-ing experiences. A kind of requiem for the living, particularly as the circles become ever decreasing and the light dims once more.

I have been making photographs for maybe 35 years. That’s a long time spent staring at things and occasionally furtively stealing from the ebb and flow of the quotidian. For the last 15 or so, I have moved away from specifically themed works that can be easily anchored in a definitive narrative to a more oblique, perhaps more overtly autobiographical approach, my Attempts at a Successful Day. Given that culturally I look more towards Berlin than Boston and have a native Northside aesthetic, it is natural that I embrace heartily the absence of a rainbow at the end of a French movie compared to the producer schmaltz from Hollywood. If asked what themes are generally present in my work, a reply of love, loss, and little redemption would sit comfortably astride my offerings, and yet I was still surprised by what emerged here. While it inevitably encompasses those inherent motifs, it is also somewhat more revealing and coherent than I would have liked.

Solastalgia, as it has emerged, is the result of a tango between my notions and the dialogue of the images between themselves, the latter of which tends to lead the assemblage and rhythm. The photographs led, and I followed openly but not unquestionably. While the strength of individual images is important, it is the inter as much as the intra dialogue between these disparate works that is my point of departure and arrival. They are a manifestation or narrativization of an ongoing inner monologue, saying things I sometimes wish they wouldn’t, but I yield to their resonances rather than subvert their possibilities. These photographs are not from an individual project (save for the grand one, of course…) but rather from diverse periods of looking. I liken this way of curating from an archive of gazing as somewhat like that circus trick of spinning plates. At any one moment in its hovering arrangement, it can all come crashing down; maybe it has already done so.

Photographs are slices across the time-space continuum and, as such, exist as single extractions with an unfortunate burden of supposedly revealing certainties or truths. But even before AI, they were and are malleable and organic. Their readings can be nudged this way and that by an adjacent image or object, or more firmly by text or title. They are fixed in time but not in absolute meaning; their existence and scale on a wall or in a book can nudge them in different directions. As this sequence arranged itself, I was somewhat taken aback by its overall melancholic darkness. Given that the choreography of looking and feeling continues with the subsequent sizing, sequencing, and switching entailed in making this exhibition, this must be how I think and feel deep down, right now.

Troubling, isn’t it?