STRAIGHTCUT II

Michael Desmond

When Jacky Redgate began the series STRAIGHTCUT in 2001, the dialogue between architecture and social experience, and between sculpture and photography as distinct visual genres, was a vital impetus for the production of her photographs. Perhaps the most formal and severe works she has produced in her career, STRAIGHTCUT is a logical extension of an ongoing relationship with geometry and visual perception. In the photographs, orange and white objects are located in an environment of mirrors that allows the front and back to be viewed simultaneously. The series was prompted by the example of modernist and proto-feminist photographer Florence Henri (1895–1982), who studied painting with Fernand Léger during the 1920s and learnt photography at the Bauhaus with Lucia and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in the 1930s. Henri, who is known for her portraits, also worked in advertising. She used mirrors in a number of her photographs to create fragmented images reminiscent of the cubist painters (her teacher Léger was one of the original cubists) or the kind of ambiguous spaces favoured by the contemporaneous surrealist movement. Naming the lattice-bound colour of artist Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) as a reference, Redgate was specifically interested in Henri’s use of horizontals and verticals and the way in which this coincided with her own investigations of geometric space. In STRAIGHTCUT, Redgate further refined her interrogation of the relationship between image and object in space that informs her sculptural and photographic modes.

STRAIGHTCUT was created in two distinct campaigns, the first between 2001 and 2004 using orange and white stackable plastic picnic and food containers positioned within mirrored spaces. The mirrored walls in this first body of work are angled to multiply the objects, providing either different views of the same objects or replicas of the original. The multiplicity of viewpoints in STRAIGHTCUT challenges the monocular vision of the camera, offering, if not sculptural, then architectural perspectives. Redgate works each object into space, alternately opening or flattening a vista, matching edges and seams with horizontals, verticals and diagonals to place shapes within a mathematically precise composition. The emphasis on relationships and junctures (and use of simple domestic objects) recalls the sculptural project of 1990 associated with Fox-Talbot’s and Daguerre’s photographs,(1) but with the difference that STRAIGHTCUT embeds rather than exhumes form. Having rendered the strident orange hue as intense as the plastic containers themselves, Redgate sought to align the edges of the object and the seams in the white background with their reflection, so that they might become part of, yet resist dissolution within space.

Redgate recommenced work on STRAIGHTCUT in 2005 after a break of nearly a year. In this second campaign, she continued to employ moulded plastic food containers but introduced a number of new objects and colours (blue and yellow) to the environment. The use of such mass-produced containers might imply affinities with Pop art. However, there is little to suggest that Redgate intends either a celebration of banal material culture or a critique of consumer society. This is not to say that the subject matter is ignored or considered neutral. Indeed, the rich colours and the polished reflective qualities of the synthetic surfaces are utilised to good effect to create a simple but forceful composition of horizontals and verticals. The modular quality of the food trays is emphasised as a complex foil to the basic ribbons of colour, as is the detailed internal geometry of ovals, rectangles and square recesses in the containers themselves. Unlike the first works in STRAIGHTCUT, the mirrors in this last suite of photographs are always placed at right angles to the picture plane, conferring a regularity and formality to the composition. As a result, the photographs appear less architectural than the previous works – and flatter, more like a painting. Coloured lines of plastic objects cross the white background, creating the effect of an early modernist abstraction by one of the de Stijl painters; but in this composition, a line of blue sushi trays might be doubled by a mirror. The monochrome band of containers and the white ‘ground’ of the composition are simultaneously real and illusory, concrete and abstract. In STRAIGHTCUT, Redgate’s cool minimal aesthetic provides, literally, a space for reflection as she continues her investigation of the divine and teasing relationship between reality and art, between symmetry and beauty.

(1) Redgate’s prototype of 'Untitled, 1990, from Anonymous [probably Daguerre or Niépce de Saint-Victor], table prepared for a meal, c. 1829', is exhibited in the current exhibition.

This text has been adapted by Michael Desmond from his monograph essay, ‘Imagining space’, in 'Jacky Redgate: Survey 1980–2003', Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CASCA), Adelaide, 2005