Calum Colvin (United Kingdom)

Collective exhibition (1993 – 2003)

Programme: Galeria Fot-Art, Monte Cassino 5 Sunday (22.03) Start 18:00

Born in 1961 in Glasgow, professor of Fine  Art Photography, University of Dundee.
My work is a hybrid of concerns and practices from the disciplines of Sculpture, Painting, Electronic Imaging and Photography. I use painting and lighting techniques in the construction of elaborate narrative tableau, which are photographed and exhibited as large-scale colour photographic prints. I am interested in the process of transformation that occurs when everyday objects are juxtaposed with painted images (often) appropriated from the annals of Western  Art History.  The visual illusions/allegories are intended to draw the viewer into a creative dialogue as the images are interpreted, touching on themes of gender , art, history and national identity.

Ornithology
Representations of birds appear symbolically in various forms as victims of human conceit and neglect. In this way the bird symbol is one of innocent nature corrupted by human action. In a sense this occurs again and again in my photographs, but there are other layers of symbolism in the use of birds. It highlights the complexity of meaning I aimed at achieving through the simple technique of staged constructed scenarios orchestrated before and recorded in front of a large-format camera. It is a multi-layered and endlessly cross-referenced image touching on themes of optical illusion, corrupted nature,
transformation, evolution and reproduction. Although  the Deaf Man's Villa was titled after Goya's home near Madrid, the place where he painted his incredible Black Paintings, the title became something more to me. I began to see the Villa as an emblem for the world as a whole and the  Deaf Man as humankind.  The general abuse of the planet by man coupled with the usually catastrophic attempts to interfere in the natural processes, for example, re-introducing extinct species, became an issue of some concern and I wanted to explore the consequences of this kind of behaviour .  As you mentioned, the use of bird imagery became more central to the image in the mid 90's when I started work on an ongoing series of images under the collective title, Ornithology, although in fact the works touched on many themes. I wanted to create a series of images which contained social commentary masked in a kind of urban  Audobonesque visual style.  These works include The Magnificent Frigatebird, an image which meditates on Scottish working-class culture, and  Sacred Ibis, which looks at the destructive aspects of the lottery obsession.

Sacred and Profane
Sacred and Profane, exhibition of eight large-scale photographic artworks commissioned by the National Galleries of Scotland.  The works are investigations of well known paintings in the collection such as Titian, Rubens and Canova using techniques from painting, sculpture and photography to create complex compositions which question and comment on the status and narrative of the original artworks. A prominent and recurrent theme in this work is Scotland as artifact and environment.
Exhibited in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern  Art, Edinburgh, National Machado de Castro Museum, Coimbra, Portugal in 1998, and in 1999 Martha Schneider Gallery , Chicago. Full colour 47-page catalogue published by The National Galleries of Scotland, essay by James Lawson, University of Edinburgh.