Underneath
an Abject Window |
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Underneath an Abject Window There's something bittersweet about Joss McKinley's photography. The world he depicts seems to be slowly sinking into decay. "I'm comfortable with the notion of death," he explains. "I'm intrigued by what happens when something dies." His series Underneath an Abject Window focused on his fascination with transience and loss. The project was prompted by the chance discovery of a large number of wasps, which had died on his windowsill over a period of months. As the son of a taxidermist, collecting and displaying dead things felt normal. As other creatures began to die in and around his home, McKinley photographed their motionless corpses. "I'm interested in the aesthetic power a body holds in an image even when it is lifeless. There's a potency to a creature whose body is still and unresponsive but also imposing in an image," he notes. Joss studied graphic design at St Martins before moving into photography, graduating from London College of Communication with an MA in 2006. No matter what subject he approaches, his work reflects a gothic side of life. The Moonlight Room series captured the atmospheric "landscapes" of the nocturnal enclosures at London Zoo. "I under lit these environments to move away from the real towards something fantastical, dark and looming. The traces of foliage only give a suggestion of the subject matter, throwing the viewer's sense of size, space and composition," he points out. Part of what makes McKinley's work so atmospheric is its dramatic chiaroscuro. Yet his images aren't staged and he doesn't chase his subjects. Instead, he waits for them to come to him. A bit like death itself – Francesca Gavin, Arts editor of Dazed & Confused 2007 Underneath an Abject Window Abject. ab-ject. adj. Allowing no hope of improvement or relief. Window. win-dow. n. An opportunity to see or experience something. Underneath an abject window. We are. Ours all. Shared. Exception none. Fear not death, death makes all equal. Here we sit, holding precious every breath. Waiting like one to many last chances. Petrified by the knowledge that exhalation or exaltation must follow. Let go. Let it all go. We long to weaken and weaken too long. Each day a silken thread. Silk allows no light. Age is darkness descending. Descent is petulance...once a man, twice a child. Tears tear at once peaceful paper cheeks. Surrender. Surrender to the noiseless air. Surrounded by solid establishment. Faded upholstery spotlights. There. Here. Their here. You have me now but will I ever be yours? Waiting wanting. Oily vying and days in lieu. Young. Calcium rich bones and cushy laughs, while all the while others aspire to numb. Too numb. Numb. Every lie whispered is a half-truth about a liar. Suffocating in freedom they go. It isn't what you thought it might have been. It isn't what it was. It isn't what it wasn't...It isn't. It dwells in all. Caress edges. Lacy net curtain ghosts. Reaching and grabbing for the bits between the stars. Anointed, a-noted, described before, this coil, this long walk home. None. Neither. All. Breath again. Icy tickles, Tender cold goodbyes. Marble kisses role through mouth, Tingle lips. Have you seen them then? When all and every is taken. Here we sit, unwilling pupils of a lesson we are unable to learn. Give me my eternity of nothing. With it the inability to know I was right all along. What can it mean? Just a signal. The advent of lament for those left dwelling with the living. Eventually all song becomes a sigh. Underneath the abject window. – Matthew Crowley 2006, for Hot Shoe Oct 2006 The Moonlight Rooms The Moonlight Rooms is a series of photographs taken at the nocturnal enclosures in a Zoo. There has been a tendency in recent contemporary art for paintings to mimic the effect or quality photographs in surface, composition and approach to subject. McKinley’s work could be positioned as the part of an opposing tendency of photographers who are interested in embedding the appearance and conventions of aspects of traditions of European painting as far back as the Renaissance into their imagery. There is an emphasis on theatricality, suggestion and atmospheric chiaroscuro effect that we are more comfortable, or at least more accustomed to accepting in a work of imaginative fiction such as literature, film or a canvas by Caravaggio or Rembrandt than a still photograph produced in 2005. McKinley’s father is a taxidermist, which may go some way in explaining the artist’s fascination with animals and death. He has described his intention to ‘move (his pictures) away from the real towards something fantastical, dark and looming’ to create ‘the poetic visual to which their romantic name alludes’. – Magdalene Keaney of The National Portrait Gallery, 2005 |