About Held Up To Light
Held Up To Light is an ongoing body of work by Bob McCaffrey in which latent, composite images emerge from within the pages of printed books. Through acts of close observation and transmitted light, pictorial elements from either side of the page merge to form a new, composite image. These chance compositions are discovered rather than constructed, existing in a space between perception and projection.
Each optical event is photographed and preserved as a high-quality archival photographic print. Working with analogue and digital photographic processes, the images retain the material qualities of the original printed page while transforming them into richly layered compositions in which figures, landscapes and objects merge, dissolve and reappear. The resulting works move between representation and abstraction, clarity and ambiguity, inviting prolonged looking as new visual relationships continue to emerge.
Grounded in photography yet informed by the histories of collage, the readymade and Surrealist chance encounters, Held Up To Light explores how ordinary printed matter can unexpectedly reveal images that appear both familiar and almost impossible.
About The Artist
Bob McCaffrey is a visual artist whose work explores the emergence of images through light, perception and chance. Working primarily with photography and moving image, he investigates moments in which ordinary systems unexpectedly produce extraordinary visual events.
@bobmccaffreyartist
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