Re-Imagined Prisons

Emily Allchurch’s new series, Urban Chiaroscuro, is aphotographic homage to Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s(1729-78) darkest work; but it is also an explorationof her own imagination.The star ting point for eachpicture is a specific plate from the eighteenth centuryarchitect’s sinister Carceri d’Invenzione (ImaginaryPrisons), first published1749-50,an enigmatic series ofetchings that has been admired by creators as diverseas Aldous Huxley and M.C.Escher – Huxley describedthem as ‘the strangest and in some ways the mostbeautiful of Piranesi’s etchings’. Allchurch has painstak-ingly collaged found elements on the visual structureof each of seven plates: every detail is a contempo-rary photograph she has made for this purpose,and acomplete image may involve the seamless integration ofhundreds of parts.Urban Chiaroscuro 5:Rome,for instance,is composed from multiple images of Mussolini’s fascistarchitecture, an ancient bridge, a contemporarystreet sign, and so on. In one sense, then,nothing hereis invented. Everything is consciously chosen. Theframework is Piranesi’s; the imagery is documentary,collected and composed from the real world.Thistechnique of visual transposition, like a strict poeticrhyme scheme, sets the parameters within whichAllchurch’s own creativity emerges.

The effect is uncanny. The images are familiar yetstrange.Those who know the Piranesi originals willrecognise the organisation that masks the details ofconstruction; those who don’t,will recognise present-day elements, yet be drawn into these incongruouswomb-like spaces that nevertheless have an air ofmenace.They are scenes in which a murder or a mug-ging might have taken place: apparently deserted, butobserved from afar by unseen authorities who aretoo distant or unconcerned to intervene.The pres-ence of surveillance cameras suggests that somethingbad might happen.The scale is unclear. Steps leadsomewhere, but where? Windows are barred withgrilles. Light from elsewhere suggests there might bea way out, another exit, but only for those who areprepared to run, their footsteps echoing up high intothe vaulted atrium.

Urban

Chiaroscuro

EmilyAllchurch

CoverDetail Urban Chiaroscuro 4:Rome (after Piranesi)

AllchurchUrban Chiaroscuro 5

PiranesiCarceri d’Invenzione IV (1st state)

The surveillancecamera s and mirrors,modern signs andgraffiti and othercontemporary detailsgradually becomeapparent a s the eyetravels around the created space.

Urban Chiaroscuro1: London (after Piranesi)

London

These spaces are not completely devoid of humanpresence: within some a tiny figure can be found – aman kneeling praying in the inside of a mosque, theartist’s own reflection in a curved mirror as she pho-tographs the scene, a blurred figure striding quicklyaway from danger, tiny figures of workmen in a lift. Inall seven there is some trace of humanity, a shadow ifnot a person. But the architecture and the spacedominate and there is nothing reassuring about dis-covering that you are not alone here.

Within the strict formal architectural space and theconstraints of Piranesi’s structures,Allchurch placeselements with contemporary resonance which canbe decoded one by one: the cameras and mirrors,modern signs and graffiti and other contemporarydetails gradually become apparent as the eye travelsaround the created space.This is a trope drawn fromthe frontispiece of Piranesi’s work where the title iscarved into the prison wall. In Allchurch’s interpreta-tions, the viewer is drawn into the enclosing space bylight, by perspective and by the desire to explore andmake sense of the incongruities of structure. Thescale of the pieces encourages us to enter within theframe and discover the depth and detail, to imaginethe tactile qualities of the space.

Each of the photographic elements has an overtmeaning; nothing is arbitrary. In one sense they arecomposite documentary records of the artist’s journeyaround a particular city in pursuit of the jigsaw piecesthat will complete her mapped image.She compressesa journey around a city into a single scene.Allchurchworks on one picture at a time, collecting the urbandetails and angles that will complete the puzzle, evendreaming about entering the spaces that Piranesiinvented. But behind this manifest content, and theconsciously chosen symbols, there are hints of latentfears, terror even. It is not far-fetched to say thatPiranesi’s subject wasn’t so much architecture but thepsyche.This is a theatre of the mind with its jumbledsymbolic content.Archways, tunnels,pillars and bollardshave obvious sexual connotations for the Freudian.

PiranesiCarceri d’Invenzione I Title plate (1st state)

DetailUrban Chiaroscuro2:London (after Piranesi)

Urban Chiaroscuro2: London (after Piranesi) Detail Piranesi Carceri d’Invenzione XVI (1st state)

“Beyond the real,historical prisonsof too muchtidiness and thosewhere anarchyengenders the hellof physical andmoral chaos therelie yet other prisons,no less terrible for being fanta sticand unembodied—the metaphysicalprisons, whose seat is within the mind, whosewalls are made of nightmare andincomprehension,whose chains areanxiety and theirracks a sense ofpersonal and evengeneric guilt.”

As well as having the quality of interpretable dreams– Piranesi’s and Allchurch’s - these imaginary prisonsare also the stages on which a nightmare mightunfold. At an autobiographical level, it is significantthat in a previous series the artist also engaged withfear – there in a much more straightforward filmicmode she documented ominous urban landscapes,often at dusk, pedestrian spaces with only one wayout.This fear was not an abstract one: some of theemotional charge of both series comes from a realmemory of danger.Twilight for her is always bothbeautiful and menacing. She was understandablydrawn to Piranesi’s etchings which provide visualmetaphors for a state of mind that resonates with herown. She has to dare herself to enter some of thedarker recesses of sites she wants to photograph tocomplete an image, challenging her own sense ofdanger.The power of these works, then, resides intheir dreamlike construction of uncomfortable terrainas much as in the implied meanings of their elements.

Photographic illustrations only go so far in communi-cating the visual impact of the series. Each picture ismounted as a transparency on a lightbox. WherePiranesi’s sombre etchings seemed to be moving inthe direction of pure blackness,Allchurch introducescolour and light. Each city - Rome, London, Paris - haspeculiar qualities of luminosity for her that determinethe palette for the images associated with that place.London, for instance, is characterised by the yellowishlight from the bricks of the East End; but also themetallic bluish tones of the Jubilee Line’s harsh light-ing from which parts of Urban Chiaroscuro 2: London iscomposed. Rome’s light is tinged with a warmerorange, or as in Urban Chiaroscuro 5: Rome, the whitelight reflected from Mussolini’s version of modernism.As a series, the seven palettes of the seven imagescomplement each other in their tonal modulations.Light and colour provide a note of optimism that islacking in Piranesi’s dark vision, but this optimism istinged with contemporary uncertainty and a sense offoreboding.

Nigel Warburton

Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione

InstallationUrban Chiaroscuro4:Rome (after Piranesi)

Urban Chiaroscuro4: Rome (after Piranesi)

Rom

e

Urban Chiaroscuro5: Rome (after Piranesi) Detail Piranesi Carceri d’Invenzione IV (1st state)

Urban Chiaroscuro 3: Rome (after Piranesi)

Urban Chiaroscuro6: Paris (after Piranesi)

Overleaf Detail Piranesi Carceri d’Invenzione XII (2nd state)

Paris

Urban Chiaroscuro7: Paris (after Piranesi)

Previous page Detail Piranesi Carceri d’Invenzione XV (2nd state)

Emily Allchurch

Born Jersey,Channel Islands 1974

Education

1997-99 Royal College of Art,MA Sculpture1993-96 Kent Institute of Art & Design, BA (Hons) Fine Art

Solo exhibitions

2007 Urban Chiaroscuro, Frost & Reed Contemporary, London2006 Emily Allchurch, A Retropsective Frost & Reed Contemporary, London

Model City, Galica Arte Contemporanea,MilanModel City, Alberta College of Art & Design,Calgary,Canada

2004/5 Settings,The Blue Gallery, London2003 Setting, Galica Arte Contemporanea,Milan2002 Light Sensitive, east73rdgallery, London

Selected exhibitions

2007 The Light Fantastic,Nicholas Metivier Gallery,Toronto,CanadaBritain in Pictures, Museum of Film & Photography, Bradford (BBC Commission)

2006 Lumière, transparence, opacité,Nouveau Musée National de MonacoMetropolitanscape, Palazzo Cavour, Olimpiadi Program of Culture,TurinPast, Present, Future, Frost & Reed Contemporary, LondonCeleste Art Prize,Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, LondonMaking Space, Corporation of London, Spitalfields, LondonThe Boundary, the Limit, a look at the City, Reggio Emilia, Italy

2005 The Wrong Map,Three Colts Gallery, LondonA Digital Picture of Britain, Museum of Film & Photography,Bradford (BBC Commission)

2003 Landscape,The Blue Gallery, LondonLa Ciudad Radiante, Bancaja Foundation,Valencia, SpainDistopie Urbane, Change Studio d’Arte Contemporanea,Rome

2002 2 in uno, Galica Arte Contempoanea,Milan2001 Visions of Arcadia,Britart.com Project Space, London

Nineplusnine: Exterior,The Spitz Gallery, LondonAnd then there was the bad weather…LWF Projects, Memphis,USA

2000 And then there was the bad weather…LWF Projects, Hoxton, LondonTunnel Vision, Alydwych tube station, London,Open HouseRoute 12:36, South London Gallery, London

Each of the Urban Chiaroscuro series is available as a backlit transparency:117 x 164 cm – Edition of 481.5 x 116.4 cm – Edition of 4

For the complete cv please refer towww.emilyallchurch.comwww.frostandreed.com

Frost & Reed Contemporary

2 - 4 King StreetSt James’sLondon SW1Y 6QP

T +44 (0)20 7839 4645F +44 (0)20 7839 1166E contemporary@frostandreed.comW frostandreed.com

Published by Frost & ReedISBN 978-0-9556134-1-8