Michael G Jackson

ATO>MIC #15, Unique Silver Luminogram Print, Warm toned black and white abstract

2020

ATO>MIC #3, 2020 Unique Gelatin Silver Print/ Luminogram and Photogram technique, Printed on tea infused fibre based paper, Custom Framed: museum mount-board with antireflective UV protective art glass in dark brown lacquered hardwood frame, /hand made in UK/ 23 x 18 cm (image print) 40.5 x 36 cm (Framed) Unique Series: ATO>MIC Signed and dated in pencil on verso Provided with the Certificate of Authenticity “The ATO>MIC work started as an attempt to replicate the idea behind still life painting - where you are trying to reproduce the image of solid looking things, things that could be on a shelf. So, I wanted to try doing that with just using light instead of paints - however I soon started to see the similarities with Harold Edgerton’s famous atomic explosion photos and how the scale of my work could be switched between small items on a shelf to enormous atomic explosions. That is the reason behind the strange title ATO>MIC - where the “>” is a kind of link between larger and smaller scales, between the two influencing ideas.” – Mike G Jackson The images (from the ATO>MIC series) may be reminiscent of the first milliseconds of atomic bomb explosions captured by Harold Edgerton's Rapatronic camera in the early 1950s but also visualise the thought of Maholy-Nagy’s bold visions in the Bauhaus’s movement toward the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.” The 3D concepts that were first expanded in the same art movement by El Lissitzky a hundred years ago, are also explored here by Jackson’s drowned thin line within the third of the image. In his vision, the line reflects a shelf with the object on top, by adding the weight to it, the gravity pushing them down. Or maybe the thin line is just the horizon, where the enormous atomic blast took place…? Beyond these flat forms of two dimensional ‘lumino-graphic’ works on paper, the purest form of photography (‘light drawing’) lays a visible path to three-dimensional imaginary world, realised in precise composition, rhythm and warm earthy tones of these works. It’s up to the viewer to decide what they prefer to see and take with them. As Wassily Kandinsky once said; “Imagination is what allows your mind to discover.” About the Artist: Michael G Jackson...

#396, 2016 Silver Gelatin Luminogram Print, Framed (classic museum style white book mount board and black frame) Image size: 40.6 x 30.5 cm Framed: 58 x 49 cm Unique Series: The Self Representation of Light Signed and dated in pen on verso © Michael Jackson The Luminograms are made from the most simple of procedures - directing light onto silver gelatin photo paper. However, it is that simplicity that allows Jackson to adapt his own way of thinking into the making of the finished piece. As he says, it's as close as he can get in photography to painting. After moving to Wales in 2007, Michael Jackson spent the next eight years creating an extensive study of a single local beach - Poppit Sands. After years of examining the beach, he realised that in effect he was studying himself and his reaction to the beach - rather than the physical landscape. He then started looking at the beach as simply a way of dividing up the camera frame - the lines and curves and focal points. It was during the long period of producing Poppit Sands prints in the darkroom that he discovered how to start making luminograms. "I feel strongly that the luminograms represent a form of moulded light. You use your process to direct and mould the light and the paper receives it in its own magical way and translates that into a form that seems fantastical but also it has one foot in reality. The piece itself so often seems like a photograph of a sculpture, when it fact it is neither. I imagine that I am taking something that you cannot feel and I am making it appear in a seemingly three dimensional form that is balanced and controlled. Just like sculpting clay." Michael G Jackson...

Black and white unique silver gelatin print, (chemical print on fiber-based paper), in white frame. Betsy Kenyon’s work is a merging of different process...

Perpetuum Mobile LXXX signed and title size 27"5x39"3 framed 44"5x33"4 Tomasz Winiarski was born in 1982 in Bielsko- Biala, Poland. In the ye...