© Veronica Bailey, Olympus from the series Modern Myths
Bernheimer Fine Art Haldenstr. 11 6006 Lucerne Suisse
Bernheimer Fine Art Photography is proud to announce an exhibition of Photographs by the English artist Veronica Bailey.
Modern Myths is Veronica Bailey’s latest body of work and again it is a meditative exercise focusing upon traditional yet increasingly threatened forms of human communication and knowledge dissemination. Where 2 Willow Road and Hours of Devotion took the book and Postscript the more delicate nature of letters, Modern Myths takes newsprint as its trigger.
Newspapers are intrinsically ephemeral wedges of low-grade paper written and designed to pass on only the most recent take on an ever evolving and devolving news story. They are the essence of cheap, disposable pulp, their shelf life barely even 24 hours. But in that time, in one way or another, the whole broad spectrum of the human experience is embedded within. With Modern Myths, this is inferred obliquely while Bailey manipulates the tight sheets, into suggestive forms and haphazard shapes, creating line from the paper’s edges.
The typefaces that lie, almost scattered, across these sheets are intentionally obscured and the series is reliant on form and colour to engender its own rhythms. Each image has been allotted with a title referencing the deities of Greek mythology, imposing the relevant characteristics of each on the form, as it is read. And the key image, the one that in a sense resonates across the series and endows it with its meaning, is Olympus, that rarefied dwelling place of the gods, the hub that lay at the heart of all their nefarious plots and petty jealousies.
