This exhibition of photographic works by Roseanne Lynch highlights her consideration of photography’s material and speculative edges. Her images record the compelling remnants of 20th century utopian movements through her residencies at various significant architectural sites in Europe and Canada. These connect with her non-representational images made through analogue practices and interventions on photographic surfaces.

Lynch’s abstract and geometric images are created by harnessing tracings of light using darkroom processes explicitly showing the materials of photography. These photogram and luminogram works offer gradations of contrast showing the consequences of her making strategies with attention to the sensitivity of the paper surface, interactions with light and durations of exposure. Her investigations are combined with physical folding and crumpling of paper, which in turn create arrangements and concentrations of light and texture. Through material plays of space and volume, these abstract images are suggestive of complex yet seemingly effortless visual constructions.

These non-representational images work together with Lynch’s architectural documentary photographs from seminal modernist sites such as the Bauhaus Buildings and Bauhaus Buildings Research Archive, Dessau, Germany; Eileen Gray’s modernist villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France; the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (containing a model of the Banff National Park Pavilion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Francis Conroy Sullivan); and a unit of Charlotte Perriand’s kitchen from Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation. During her time at these locations, Lynch witnessed and documented these sites, their interiors and the objects they contain. Her images of modernist architectural design bring with them the ripple effect of their functional, idealistic and complicated histories. While adding to the network of architectural photographic documents, these works also explore the role such images have in social and collective thinking, the archive, and the creation of cultural memory. Her images act as visual prompts through the recognition of modernist identifiers showing the power of photography in shaping the visual history of modern architecture.

Through making in abstract and documentary ways, Lynch’s work explores the peculiarity of photographic images in terms of what they allow to appear and the ways in which they stand in for what they represent. Her work considers the role of photography in the coding of social structures that create and maintain themselves through images. By engaging with the performative functions of the medium, this presentation of Lynch’s work shows how photographic transformation influences the production of cultural artefacts and collective imaginaries.

As a title, No Want of Evidence borrows words liberally from Rosalind Krauss’s seminal text The Optical Unconscious to emphasise Lynch’s engagement with the suggestive intensities photographic images hold.

Limited edition artists’ prints are available in our photobook shop and online here. A full price list for the pieces in the exhibition is available here.

Curator Bio:
Pádraig Spillane is an artist, educator, and independent curator. Exhibitions he has curated include Contradictory Senses for Lismore Castle Arts; Roseanne Lynch, Semblance, Lavit Gallery; Kevin Mooney, Apparition, Sternview Gallery; Viviane Sassen, Parasomnia, Crawford Art Gallery with Stag & Deer. Pádraig lectures at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design.