Dryden Goodwin: Cast
Exhibition Dates: 26 September – 16 November 2008
Location: 8 Great Newport Street
Cast will be a major exhibition of new work by the British artist Dryden Goodwin. It is co-commissioned by The Photographers’ Gallery and Photoworks and is the last solo exhibition at the Gallery’s current location. It will be the first time that Goodwin has developed a significant body of photographic based works, and will comprise of a series made in and around the Gallery’s new home at Ramillies Street, near Oxford and Regent Street.
Goodwin is drawn to using titles that hold many possible meanings, resonances and often contradictions. Cast is no exception and its multiple themes, such as to throw, to encase an object, to create a spell, to generate uncertainty – reflect the ambiguity inherent in his work. Featuring strangers caught at times of private moments or quiet reflection, within very public spaces, these new works explore a rich dialogue between drawing and photography. Goodwin extends his practice of drawing or scratching into the surface of the image, an action that is at once intimate and invasive. It is a physical intervention into the stalled nature of photographic time that the artist characterises as a way of ‘thinking into the photograph’.
Each of these new series feature portraits of strangers encountered while travelling across the city on trains, buses and on foot. In Cradle Goodwin photographs passers-by on the street at night and, once printed, carefully scratches over their faces with an etching needle to creating web-like markings. For Caul a digital stylus and drawing tablet is used to project membranes of bright red lines into the personal space of passengers on the top decks of night buses. Rock, a moving image work, echoes Caul, and re-animates sequences of photographs, depicting the subjects in constant stasis. In Casting panoramic shots of nocturnal street scenes are combined with multiple drawings of one or more people Goodwin studies. In Shapeshifter, a series of nearly 700 small sketches of fellow travellers on trains are displayed both individually and as a moving image work that merges all of the portraits into one constantly changing figure.
Alive with ambiguities about what might be revealed or obscured, these new works both reflect a society where fear, suspicion and ever-present surveillance increasingly infect the atmosphere of public space, but also aspire to forms of empathy and connectedness. The drawn marks suggest a touch or caress, both revealing and partially protecting these individuals.
Dryden Goodwin (b. 1971) lives and works in London. He graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art with a BA Hons in Fine Art in 1996 and has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1995. This ambitious project, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, has been realised in collaboration with the commissioning agency Photoworks. It will also coincide with the publication of a significant monograph, made in collaboration between Photoworks, The Photographers’ Gallery and Steidl and will be launched to coincide with the opening of the exhibition. Goodwin is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Visit www.drydengoodwin.com
This will be our last exhibition at this location, at the end of the month we will move out of Great Newport Street and into a temporary space at 16 – 18 Ramillies Street, W1. For more information about the Gallery’s new location please visit the website. We are embarking on a campaign to build a new gallery on the Ramillies Street site. Due to open in 2011, this will allow us to expand our pioneering role of exhibiting, educating and engaging people with photography. Commissions such as Cast are a demonstration of our commitment to recognising, nurturing and supporting photographic talent in the UK
