Damian Griffiths: ‘One More First Time’

Damian Griffiths


One More First Time 


9 September- 3 October 2020 
OPENING Wednesday 9 September, 5 – 8:30pm

PALFREY is pleased to present One More First Time, a new assemblage by Damian Griffiths. This exhibition combines photography, machines, found objects and sculptural installation. At its core are Griffiths’ photographs. These deceptively complex images are calibrated to traverse the gamut of documentary practice, the everyday and postconceptual photography. Taking pleasure in the contingent textures, layerings and severings of urban space, and with their insistent attention to reflective glass surfaces, the images invite multiple associations. The reflections, refractions, and translucencies provide the backdrop for multiple focal points to emerge within the images. They also index the placing of the camera and the movements of light around it, which serve to inject the far into the near, outside into inside.
 
The photographs trace the spatial theatre of a glamourless retail realm, while also alluding – through the lateral expanses of glass – to the genealogy of the picture plane in dialogue with the residues of painting. They deftly observe texts in these settings as found in the language of labels and straplines. The focus on retail aesthetics is mirrored in their exploration of the photograph as a process of flattening – as a conversion and compression of multiple planes and angles into a single consumable plane.
 
Alongside the photographic images is a mechanical saw. We see it in the round, placed on a mirrored corner plinth, in operation. Its heavy action pumps away at a solid core of marble. This work – If capitalism isn’t the problem why is money the solution? – considers the construction of surfaces, and the transitions between objects and images, through tactics that are unlike but complementary to the photographs.
 
 
Damian Griffiths graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2012. Recent shows include: Picture Palace, Transition Gallery, London 2020; Annka Kultys Gallery, London 2017; WorkWorkDrink (solo) Karst, Plymouth 2014.