Permanent Gallery, 20 Bedford Place, Brighton, UK
Saturday 22nd September – Sunday 28th October 2007
Open Thurs/Fri/Sun 1pm – 6pm Sat 11am – 6pm

What maybe standard fare for FT readers has now taken on a decidedly different twist in the world of art, with a new photographic exhibition in Brighton of photographs dealing with the supernatural, paranormal and occult.

The exhibition takes its title from an 1869 essay by the French spiritualist Camille Flammarion concerning the use of the emerging new technology of photography to scientifically document the unseen worlds of psychics and paranormal phenomena. The objective camera eye was seen by spiritualists and psychical researchers at the time as a way to produce empirical proof of such phenomena, be it the presence of spirits, levitating objects or strange emanations.

The show – which runs for over a month from 22 September – is made up of collections from four different artists who investigate well-documented fortean subject areas with different stylistic approaches that mimic the methodology of the original researchers.

Victoria Emes has manufactured laboratory-style conditions in her ‘Illustrations of Hypnosis’. Inspired by August Strindberg’s 19th-century experiments using a pinhole camera, Emes’s images of young women under hypnosis explore the metaphysical potential of a lens-less photography. In her ‘Pyschomanteum Studies’, Emes’s subjects are photographed in an equally trance-like state, mirror-gazing in a specially constructed apparition chamber designed to facilitate certain visionary experiences. http://www.victoriaemes.com

Shannon Taggart’s project, ‘The Spiritualists’, is the result of more than five years photographing Spiritualist communities in England and the US. The unsettling and ambiguous images featured in the show, representing the ‘channelling’ experiences of psychic mediums, seem to allude to the possibility of an unseen presence.
http://www.shannontaggart.com/TheSpiritualists/

In her recent ‘Photism’ series, Clare Strand has deployed a contemporary aura camera to hint at the supposed psychical potential of her adolescent subjects and the often-assumed capacity of the photograph to accurately record non-physical phenomena. The instructional tableaux of her ‘Kirlian Studies’ present a series of peculiar and enigmatic experiments, the artist’s personal investigation into the absurd.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman has contributed a rich and varied collection of images to the exhibition, the result of his personal research into the paranormal. These photographs – rooted in rational investigation – acquire a strangely aesthetic quality when re-presented in a gallery context, offering a telling counterpoint to the quasi-scientific rigour which informs the artistic practices of Strand and Emes. This contrast is extended by a digital projection of amateur images downloaded from the internet. Stripped of their original context, the pictures – purporting to document seemingly inexplicable phenomena – acquire a highly visual and, at times, absurdly comic dimension.