Witzenhausen Gallery is proud to present Nature Morte: The matter of art and life, Cynthia Greig's first solo show in Europe. This exhibition presents a selection of photographs and video works from two of her most recent series: Nature Morte (2008, in progress) and Representations (2001-2008). Since 1990 Cynthia Greig has been making work that explores the exchange of influence between perception and experience, and photography's unique role in negotiating what we believe to be real or true. Before herRepresentations series (2001-2008), Greig explored these matters either through installation-like exhibitions or through photographs that challenged our perception of scale. In the series New Eden: The Life and Work of Isabelle Raymond (1993 to present), she created a fictional XIXth century cross-dressing female photographer; Greig made her own XIXth century-like photographs and text accompanying the images, in order to stress the power of photographic documents in the reconstruction of historical facts. In Life-Size (2001-2003), tiny objects are blown up to life-size while being held by gigantic human finger tips; inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, Greig explores how perception can deceive our understanding of the truth and shows us again that photography can act as an obstacle when discerning between fact and fiction. From 2002, Greig digs deeper into her conceptual topics, creating and developing her own technique. Representations (2001-2008) Nature Morte, (2008-2010) combine color photography and drawing to create what she likes to call “photographic documents of three-dimensional drawings”. Household and daily items (a toaster, a TV, a camera, shoes) and other transient objects (such as flowers, fruits or candles) are painted white and arranged into a still life set up. The objects are outlined with charcoal, bringing forward the object’s two dimensionality and reducing them to a representation of their original use and identity. The result is a photograph which at first glance resembles a drawing. Greig’s work becomes especially relevant in the digital era, where a truthful value is still attributed to analogue photography as opposed to the deceiving value of digital techniques and manipulating computer tools. Greig’s photographs are analogue; in her own use of the technique, we find the artist stretching the possibilities of photography as a medium, not as a capturer of a fixed reality but as an apparatus that calls into question our perception of reality. In her latest body of work, Nature Morte, the artist introduces the elements of time and drawn shadows, and pays homage to the tradition of Dutch still life painting. Exploring time’s potential to transform matter and preconceptions, these single and sequential images reexamine the nature of materiality and transience, reality and illusion, art and life through the intersection of photography and drawing. .
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