Una Abertura … / An Opening …
That the world appears of its own accord, there, in an intimate opening on to the world: an irretrievable spacing of the body. Not a world already turned picture but this ground that accepts the weight of the body and accommodates its posture in a displacement with what surrounds it. The seduction of space, for each body, every body, one with others and other things: each of a desire to be with, to be a-part. Not at a distance – an impossible measure from one point to another, but open and exposed to the outside, to the possibility that the world calls forward an external appearance. This pressing matter, of illuminated matter, is the sensible surfacing of the body, an inside that is at the outside.
Howard Ursuliak’s pictures from 2002 - 2009, provide an experiential basis for questioning Western traditions of pictorial space and the construction of the viewer whose eye is positioned to observe the world through the viewpoint of the camera and the corresponding photographic image. The principles of perspectivalism; optics and geometric space – and the development of a scientific worldview have given place to this viewer as a subject in relation to an object. And documentary traditions have historically been able to make a claim for objectivity as a witness to truth based, in part, on this kind of technological determinism.
The subjectivity corresponding to this form of objectivity has assumed the character of a universal, interior self, separate from and holding at a distance, the reality of an objectified world. Until recently, this underlying model has also organized forms of knowledge of the natural world and of the ‘other’ that to a great extent have ignored the context of cultural specificity and the localization of lived, embodied experience. Obviously, there is not one, universal form of existence – of existing in space, just as there is not one shared way of understanding what the natural world is. The possibility or extent to which a photographic image can share an existence or form of being, its outside being inside becoming outside, would be a contentious aesthetic consideration that would likely have to be based on an experience of presence, figuration and embodiment. But, perhaps these are just simply a few more left over Western terms, too invested in an earlier form of self to be useful in a contemporary discourse.
(What kind of presence is this illuminated matter?)
I would like to acknowledge the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Kaja Silverman and Michael Taussig whose words have moved through mine.
Howard Ursuliak / March 2014