Hamish Tocher
Illuminated Books [no title] 4 2008
digital print
open edition
courtesy the artist and McNamara Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand

In his first solo exhibition in Australia, New Zealand photographer Hamish Tocher is exhibiting in CCP’s Gallery 4 and Shop Space from 3 April to 23 May, 2009. Naomi Cass, CCP Director interviewed Hamish via email, and began by observing that since 2003 and across a wide range of work, his practice has been photo based and yet, pictures of the world are conspicuously absent.

The subject of your work Hamish seems to be pre-existing imagery, rather than the world. Would you describe yourself as a photographer and how does the camera function in your work?

I guess it’s no revelation to anyone to say that photography is as much about making pictures as it is about taking pictures. I’ve been using the camera as a tool, in the sense that it’s a machine with which to make my work. In most of the work the technical side of it is a detail interesting only to specialists. You might say that photography is the medium, but it isn’t the message.

But there is something about the photographic nature of the objects that I am manipulating for example, in the early collage work. Recovering their relationship to their original context — recognising Robbie Williams as Robbie Williams, whilst at the same time he’s being not just a mourner at The Deposition but that particular mourner from that particular Giotto — is an experience of the world of images and the world of objects that only photography can give you. Similarly, the monocular vision that a lens gives is in a way, the basis for making comparisons. In work like the Ressemblances Parlantes, the images gain their zing from the recognition (or perhaps the creation) of a similarity in pose, mood, face — a similarity that operates across time. The camera is what puts you in the place to catch that similarity, first by extracting that flatness from the world, secondly by being a fixed point from which to look; it’s what allows you to line the similarities up with each other.

Hamish Tocher
Ressemblances Parlantes I (No.30) 2004-2005
digital print
open edition
courtesy the artist and McNamara Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand

There is an overriding interest in art history in your work, or at least image making from the past. This is immediately evident whether one is familiar with classical and early Christian iconography or not. Your work brings into the present classical sculpture as represented in old books; early Renaissance portraits, monumental trompe l’oeil ceilings and, in your current installation in CCP’s Gallery 4, you reference the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. In other work you have restaged either classical iconography (Scenes from the Life of Christ 2003), or actual figure studies (Caravaggio). What is the interest in themes and faces from the past, for a contemporary photographer?

I think there are a couple of issues here. Firstly, my relationship to the past is complicated, as is that of any artist. For me, the making process proceeds from a kind of awkwardness towards the past, the kind of fatal attraction the dorky boy feels to the glamorous girl. It’s quite voguish at the moment for artists to talk about their work proceeding from a sensitivity toward something, but nevertheless I think that that sensitivity, although it’s a cultivated feeling, is one of the key metaphors for understanding art practice now. It’s an itchy-so-scratch-it mentality. Anyway this awkwardness I feel about the past is the intensely overbearing presence of precedent in designed things. It’s an antipodean feeling, of being at the wrong end of the telescope. The more I come to know about art history, the more I recognise the patterns, tropes and concerns of history in contemporary cultural practice. Then there’s a delightful sense of the power of anachronistic sampling: that’s a pretty madcap list of source material that you’ve reeled off there, and it spans a lot of time. A S Byatt, writing about Svetlana Alpers, said ‘like most painters I know, and few historians, she believes that paintings all exist somewhere simultaneously, in a Platonic space, not in a genealogical tree.’  Well in a sense that’s true, isn’t it — if you have all those images, or even a fair smattering of them, inside your head, they do exist simultaneously to your experience of the world, and you can draw on them in that way without concerning yourself primarily with the propriety of period.

That said, though, I’m not claiming to have seen everything and to remember everything I have seen — in fact, the connection between those disparate time periods that I’m sampling, for me, is to do with the treatment of the body and its proportions, and to do with the kind of spaces that such a treatment implies. There’s a visceral narcissism in the early Renaissance, a kind of youthful full-of-the-joys-of vigour, a really sexy, peachy sense of bodies — that is what clicks so nicely with the fashion images that I’ve been comparing it with. The second part of your question was about faces: it’s the recognition of self in the past, of the sense of connection to the face and through the face the persona of these characters in these paintings, and their living counterparts, models, patrons and so on, that we look for and find in a face.

Hamish Tocher
Illuminated Books (Reni and Titian) 2008
digital print
open edition
courtesy the artist and McNamara Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand

Looking across your work, in the earlier series you use existing images almost as objects, firstly in collages and then laying down contemporary images next to historical images in a kind of conversation. Yet, in Illuminated Books (2007-2008) exhibited in the CCP Shop Space, you lay a contemporary image over or under a classical sculpture. Could you please describe this work (and your changing approach to the historical portrait).

I’ve been experimenting with the degree of intervention I’m making in the comparisons I’m forming. Work like Unknown Renaissance Portraits or Ressemblances Parlantes is meant to look almost effortless, as if you’d just opened the page to that pairing. (The works are magazine pages laid into books next to a painting, then photographed.) The intervention is all behind-the-camera. With the Illuminated Books work, I wanted to bring some of the mechanism into view, and also to work on the proximity of the two images to each other. With the early collage works, the proximity was in the viewer’s recognition, then in the book works the proximity comes from the closeness of the figures, and they are getting closer and closer in this sequence. Illuminated Books brings the faces, periods, and times as close together as they can be, skin to skin, touching, and looking out of each others’ eyes. The other interesting thing for me is the space that this implies — the illusion of depth ‘behind’ the book. It’s a space that I am interested in creating with my recent projection works — a space with a definite, shallow depth, like a niche for a sculpture.

Illuminated Books 2007-8 is really engaging, performative and, dare I say, quite funny. Are you taking the piss out of the past?

Not taking the piss, no, but definitely having a laugh. And the joke’s on me as much as anyone. How does my poor mug measure up to these classical pretty-boys and moguls? But the point is that the images exist to be engaged with, not to be deified. Some of those Romans were gods in their times, if Robert Graves is to be believed! But sorry guys, we don’t really do gods in the same way, now. As they say in the movies, ‘you’re in my world now’. There’s the potential for a tremendous disrespect here, of course, stemming from ignorance as much as anything. I have made work which I think and hope is funny — like a Giotto painting of St Francis Preaching to the Birds compared to a picture of Hugh Grant playing poker with a parrot, or an image of St Stephen (stoned to death) compared to a bored boyfriend wearing earmuffs, from Cleo or Cosmo or somewhere like that. So, by all means, laugh! I think that laughter implies affinity or empathy towards something, not scorn.

Hamish Tocher
Overhead Project (Galla Placidia) 2009 (video still)
single channel digital video
edition of one
courtesy the artist and McNamara Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand

Overhead Project (Galla Placidia) 2009 is a glorious use of light and space in CCP’s smallest gallery. Referencing the flat geometry of a Byzantine ceiling decoration, you play a trick with our experience of flat space, and what might have been anathema to the 5th century craftsman, the CCP ceiling becomes a baroque illusion. Can you describe this work and how it is made?

I first saw the CCP space in July 2008. Having done the Stations of the Cross work, using an OHP (over head projector) to project a scene onto the ceiling, I was looking at galleries rather differently — looking up a lot more, in fact. So the CCP space presented an obvious challenge, a surface that wouldn’t be easy to place an image onto. (I’m doing another show later in the year at First Site, on the barrel vaults, which present some similar challenges.) I had been looking at the starred vaults of chapels like Galla Placidia, and I connected the starred vaults with the pattern of the holes in the ceiling at CCP. The work is a video piece, made with a scale model of the ceiling, just a flat board with holes drilled in it. I’ve stitched coloured thread through the holes, on the model, and filmed the stitching, so that when it replays onto the CCP ceiling it creates the illusion that a large needle and a giant hand are stitching onto and through the ceiling. The pattern of the stitches is adapted from one of the arches in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. I’d disagree slightly with your suggestion that the makers of that space weren’t interested in illusions: in the labyrinth pattern, there’s a persistent 45-degree angle and what amounts to a drop-shadow of colouring that turns the pattern into a shallow trough, rather than a flat surface. It’s like the lines are ribbons with different colouring on each side, revealed each time the line turns the corner. They are definitely conceptually 3D objects.

Hamish Tocher
Stations of the Cross (Entombment) 2008
Installation view, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland
courtesy the artist and McNamara Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand

Overhead Project (Galla Placidia) 2009 follows Stations of the Cross 2008, also a ceiling image, using the rather prosaic technology of overhead projectors. These works form part of your Master’s Research at RMIT University. It is unusual for a photographer to be interested in manipulating space beyond the frame, beyond the window to the world of the image. Can you reflect upon your interest in space?

Forming the dialogue about that space is something I’m working on for my MFA, and I’m not perfectly clear about it yet. It has to do with creating spaces that are both interior and exterior to the image. The image is a flat thing, a sweet spot, a resonant frequency or a focal length or some such. But the spaces behind and in front of that spot are able to be manipulated, and have an effect on each other. And the experience of moving through space, in relation to that sweet spot, is something that I am coming to terms with as a subject for engagement — I mean imperfection as well as perfect illusion. Certainly I feel that the choice of a limited space in the CCP work is driven by the dimensions and the environment of CCP itself. A grander space, one that didn’t insist on its own dimensions with a device like that ceiling, might get a more grandiose treatment, like Stations of the Cross at Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland exhibited in 2008. Going back to my earlier comments about history, what I like about projection work as a response to the painted tradition of whizz-bang ceilings dedicated to the greater glory, is that it leaves no trace, makes no alteration in the fabric of the space. You can switch it off, or even put your hand in front of it, and it’s gone, as if it were never there. And the created space goes with it. I like that, I feel that it shows a proper humility in the face of the overwhelming bravura of the historical tradition. And it’s a way of embodying the diffidence that I feel about even trying to compare my practice to theirs.

Related links

http://www.hamishtocher.co.nz