DARREN ALMOND – LIGHT IMPRESSION & FULL MOON

‘To Leave a Light Impression’ and ‘Fullmoon’ stand out as the latest presentations of photographer Darren Almond’s work. White Cube Gallery has assembled a broad selection of impressive views exploring the unusual beauty of nature in twilight. Meditation and contemplation come to mind when being absorbed with the dark beauty of a state inbetween night and day.

‘Fullmoon’ is a set of photographs, which have taken Almond to every continent over a period of 13 years and are all taken under the light of a full moon using long exposure, enabling details undetectable to the human eye to be revealed.

Almond traveled to Patagonia, Tasmania, Cape Verde and the Outer Hebrides. While depicting disparate lands, the works all embody the artist’s interest in time, both as an actual, lived experience as well as a cultural and historical construct. They document his bonds to particular landscapes, and map his personal interest in geology, myth and history.

The Patagonia pictures employ classical compositions – referencing Romantic landscape painting – and are bathed in a supernatural light: the result of the lack of airborne pollution in this pristine, almost untouched land.

In the large-scale, expansive photographs of Cape Verde, rough black stones emerge from the Atlantic Ocean. The rocks are solidified lava, and this seemingly diabolic, remote landscape, that bears the evidence of its own formation so vividly, played a key role in Darwin’s book ‘On the Origin of the Species’ (1859).

Almond’s interest in what the landscape reveals is echoed in his ‘Present Form’ photographs of standing stones on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides installed at the centre of the exhibition. These photographs of individual upright stones, wrought out of the oldest known rocks in the British Isles, ravaged and partially covered with vegetation, form part of a stone circle dating from 3,000 BC, and are thought to have been used as an astronomical observatory to measure 18.6-year moon cycles. Almond has photographed the stones as evidence of our primal need to measure and quantify the passing of time.

Images
Darren Almond _ “Fullmoon at Fukushima” _ 2009
Darren Almond _ “Fullmoon” _ 2009
Darren Almond “Shan Shui Fullmoon” _ 2009