Ali McCann

A Room with a View: Part 1

From 9 June 2020—

I am preoccupied with the constructed nature of photography and the possibilities of creating alternate visual and psychological realities through the mode of still-life. My aesthetics derive from outdated art history pocket guides, 1970s art-and-design text books, photographic instruction manuals, old amateur photography magazines, and also from the high school interiors of my adolescence. Nostalgic imagery and the representations of memory intersect ambiguously with the theoretical notions of visual perception and the aesthetics of education.

—Ali McCann

In Conversation

with
Ali McCann (AM) & Emma Thomson (ET) of correspondences

AM— During my initial research phase for this project [Οι νέοι, 2019] I came across the term, Οι νέοι in an essay by Hannah Arendt called ‘The Crisis in Education’ (1954). She writes: “the children, whom, when they had outgrown their childhood and were about to enter the community of adults as young people, the Greeks simply called oι νέοι, the new ones.” Arendt speaks of this period of transition between childhood and adulthood in the context of education. This really resonated with me, because this liminal phase is something I’ve previously examined through photographic studies of geometric forms. In my earlier series ‘An Introduction to Liminal Aesthetics (2017)’, I wanted to represent the aesthetic disorientation often experienced during this learning process – a disorientation that creates an environment for errors, unintentional transformations, and new interpretations. This idea of experiential learning and the exploratory process of art making was something I wanted to carry through in the works of Οι νέοι. Yet this time I wanted to do so with less ambiguity. 

The title can also be seen as reference to the Hellenistic period of Greek culture, also considered a period of transition for Western civilisation, and the education system which evolved during this time. Of course, it was predominately a male domain, exclusive to wealthy men and young boys, although it was later offered to girls. Their access to the standard curriculum was, however, quite limited. My focus on the female educational experience is in response to this, albeit indirectly. 

AM— The series An Introduction to Liminal Aesthetics (2017) was really the foundation of my current art practice; both formally and conceptually. The transition from this exhibition into the body of work that became ‘Polytechnic (2018)’ was quite linear in a way. As with each new body of work I make, there are always specific works which are carried through to the next, and other works that fall away (only to sometimes be ‘resurrected’ in a later body of work). There were distinctive visual elements carried through to form the works of Polytechnic, such as the colour palette (whereby collectively, the works explore every possible ‘relationship’ on the colour wheel). While new objects are introduced, there is often a re-appearance of old objects and backdrops, but this time with a more considered construction or modification. 

During this period, the echoes of outdated art and design textbooks permeated my photographic compositions. I was also looking at the educational philosophies (and indeed the aesthetics) of the Bauhaus, particularly that of Kandinsky, Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy. I was also looking at the photographic work of former Bauhaus students; Florence Henri, Grit Kallin-Fischer, Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach.

These visual references are most explicit in my emphasis on geometric forms. In Polytechnic I was more concerned with creating an environment for these forms to exist, not unlike the exterior (and interior) spaces depicted in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. I made a subtle reference to de Chirico in my work Untitled 7 (2017), which was a subtle nod to de Chirico’s ‘The Scholar's Playthings, 1917’ and Geometrical Composition in a Factory Landscape, 1917. I was preoccupied then with creating a sense of distorted scale and perspective. I sought to create these so-called psychological landscapes through the arrangements of geometric objects in an imagined visual field. In this series, my interest in the symbiotic relationship between photography and painting had become more explicit.

AM— Before I started making these works I found myself revisiting Mike Kelley’s ‘Educational Complex (1995)’. This idea of our tendency to ‘fill-in’ the gaps of our memories is addressed beautifully in this work. The piece is essentially a table-top architectural model reconstructed from memory of the schools Kelley attended and the house in which he grew up. The fact that it was primarily reconstructed from memory introduces the potential for inaccurate renderings, spatial irregularities and of course, gaps. While working on Οι νέοι (2019) I was very interested in this notion of a reimagined architecture, and was also reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space at that time. I found a parallel in Bachelard’s phenomenology of place, and the interior spaces in which we situate our conscious and unconscious thoughts.

In the early 2000s I was fortunate enough to obtain a large collection of Super 8 footage from my old high school which was shot by teenagers in the mid-late 1970s. The footage is fascinating and charged with adolescent energy. Along with the mundane shots of everyday classroom activity, there are also shots of a group of adolescent boys goofing around, performing slapstick routines in a style reminiscent of Monty Python, The Goodies, and Benny Hill. This archive has almost functioned as a kind of mnemonic ‘gap-filler’ in my own recollection of my school years. Even though my experience and that of the adolescent amateur film makers was separated by two decades; the geographical location remains the same.

This raw material has found its way into my work; both directly and indirectly. In Οι νέοι, the connection to this footage is more oblique. Perhaps the main connections being the colour palette, and more importantly, the indirect reference to my mother’s classroom and the young female students who inhabited this space.

As you mention, in this body of work I am quite interested in the constructions of fact and fiction. I named each of the works after some of my mother’s students, though I only have vague recollections of these young women. Some are more vivid than others. In short, I was interested in suggesting that this body of work might have been produced by a group of adolescents, each with their own unique interests and sense of aesthetics. In developing these fictitious personas, which were based on actual people, I could more freely allow for certain haphazard outcomes of experiential learning to materialise. 

Another thing that resonated strongly for me in Mike Kelley’s ‘Educational Complex’ is his preoccupation with nostalgia and memory. His work really exposes this intersection of form and subjective experience in a brilliant way. This is something I am often trying to achieve in my own work. The blurred boundary between fact and fiction is a fundamental quality of nostalgia, because it’s the ambiguities of idealisation that make nostalgia possible. 

In hindsight, it seems there’s been a slow build up to the autobiographical explorations of Οι νέοι. In ‘Throwing Off the Hump’ (2017) and ‘Masks For Magicians’ (2018), I made both direct and indirect references to my mother, who passed away in 2014. In Throwing Off The Hump I was exploring my sense of grief at losing her so suddenly. In Masks for Magicians I was focussing on the connections between her and I; both familial and pedagogical. This connection was channelled through an old art history ‘pocket guidebook’ from my high school library, The Story of Sculpture, which had belonged to her. This was the first time I had directly mentioned her in the exhibition text/synopsis. Οι νέοι is in many ways more of an acknowledgement of her and how instrumental she was in the development of my own art education and creative development, and furthermore how I’ve approached art education as a teacher myself. These works really locate themselves in that ambiguous role between learner and educator. I guess I’m interested in the ‘slippages’ between these two states, an idea I began exploring in An Introduction to Liminal Aesthetics (2017).

AM—I see Karen as one of the foundational works of the Οι νέοι (2019) series. It was the second piece I created after Faye (Figure 12), both of which I created through a rather arduous process. I don’t mean to suggest it was burdensome, but it was definitely a little challenging. As with all works of this series, I constructed the work in stages. First I experimented with various arrangements and formations of the objects, materials and backdrops in my studio. Using a DSLR camera, I captured as many different compositions as possible within an approximate focal range. I reassembled these arrangements in different areas of my studio depending on the daylight (there is often a race against the ceaseless movement of the sun, which I find to be the best light source for my work). After studying the test images, I would occasionally modify some of the objects. For example, I painted one side of the base-ten cube in ‘mission brown’ to create the illusion of a shadow, an old photography trick I’d applied to previous works (and which I later found out was a trick Paul Outerbridge used in the 1920s). I would then swap around objects and materials to compliment other elements in the image in terms of colour, texture, and so on.

From there I moved up to my medium format camera (a sturdy Mamiya RB67 manufactured in the 1970s), with which I would capture some of the more successful compositions from the test shoot on colour negative film. Although they sometimes appear to be collaged or digitally constructed, the works are in fact all captured in a single frame.

The kitsch primitivist sculpture that appears in Karen was one of my first forays into incorporating figurative objects into my work. By chance, I found the sculpture around the same time that I found the unfinished painting which stands in the background. This figure is very much linked to my memory of a childhood friend’s house in the 1980s. While my home was more 1970s rustic, hers was a little more reflective of the pseudo sophistication and kitsch of the time – mirrored surfaces and shiny black ornamental objects. 

The figure and its ‘shadow’ (or silhouetted twin) references both modernist and ancient depictions of women. At the time I was working on Karen, I'd also come across the story of Kora of Sicyon, who was the daughter of Dibutades, the first ancient Greek to model in clay, around the 7th century BC. Pliny the Elder tells the story of Kora tracing the outline of her lover’s shadow in charcoal, which her father then built up with clay – a collaboration which led to the first recorded relief drawing. Because of this, Kora is often regarded as the earliest documented female artist in the Western tradition. A sentiment that I felt was linked closely to the notion of ‘Οι νέοι’.

The Dienes (or ‘base-ten’ block), which functions as a kind of pedestal for the figure, also has as strong resonance for me, in a pedagogical sense. I can vividly recall using these blocks to decipher mathematical problems in primary school. I struggled with mathematics, but found that these physical objects made identifying and solving problems more tangible. But more than anything, I think that primarily I was always drawn to the aesthetics of such objects themselves, and not merely to their function.

The faded green cartridge paper that fills up much of the top right section of Karen was gifted to me by the artist Ponch Hawkes, which creates a felicitous link to Australian photographic history and even more fittingly to her 1976 photo essay Our Mums and Us. 

Around this period, I was also revisiting the writings of the philosopher John Dewey, and particularly his writings in ‘Art as Experience’ (1934). He was very much instrumental in changing ideas and perceptions of what education (specifically art education) should be. His pedagogical ideology, and particularly his heuristic approach, was very much student-centric. He saw great value in allowing time for students to experience the process of art production. I wanted to somehow channel this transitory, nascent stage of adolescent art production back into my own work, to capture its haphazardness, its awkwardness, and its accidental beauty.

AM—While working on Polytechnic, I was playing with the possibilities of illusion and visual perception in the photographic image. I attempted to create shifting perspectives, whereby objects and backgrounds seem to either recede or advance depending on where your eye ‘rests’. This can be achieved much more easily in a painting or drawing (and of course through digital image making), but I enjoyed the challenge of capturing this in a single exposure with limited photographic equipment and materials I had on hand. With these seemingly incoherent visual fields, I wanted to destabilise the viewer's sense of the picture plane. I was really looking at the constructed nature of photography, by which I mean the deceptive nature of the medium.

I was also looking at the shift in the late 19th century from the conventional one-point perspective to a new way of seeing, which was evident in the still life works of Cézanne. It became apparent to me that I have, in a way, been attempting to achieve a similar pictorial effect through photographic means. The manner in which Cézanne would reveal elements of his process is something I have also been doing: a grey lead mark here, a visible brushstroke there, misaligned ‘shadows’ and so on. Furthermore, I was not only interested in his labour-intensive trial-and-error methods, but also in the sense of doubt that necessarily underpins this approach. In the essay ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty speaks of the artist’s laborious working method: “It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life and one hundred fifty sessions for a portrait.” The concept of doubt is an underlying element of my own work. Doubt is that ongoing creative struggle that makes my process somewhat labour-intensive. And it makes me realise that I’m perpetually in that liminal phase of artistic education, always learning, never quite arriving at a definitive expression, or anything certain. I try to carry that sense of doubt into the picture plane itself, to disorient the viewer to some degree with a shadow or a perspective that doesn’t seem quite right, and to create a feeling of uncertainty that I myself feel while making the work. There is a shared intimacy in this doubt, which the artist and the art-observer both partake in.

AM—I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, particularly in relation to the impact on sensory engagement and social interaction in the learning environment. So much of the learning experience relies on nuances of social interaction, facial expressions, body language, physical movements and bodily presence. But online learning is mediated through a computer screen. And the notion of ‘screen’ has a double meaning in this sense, because a sense of presence is screened out of online pedagogical interaction. I’ve found this to be the most frustrating aspect of working in this virtual way. It’s hard to ‘read’ students individually and to gauge the inter-student dynamics, which for me has always determined how a teaching session evolves. As an art teacher, I’ve found that physical settings allow for the students’ social dynamic to really shape how we talk about art. And this doesn’t translate very well into a virtual space.

For me this has really highlighted the importance of hands-on learning and the sensory aspects of art making. For example, there’s a phenomenological aspect to working in the black-and-white darkroom that you really have to be present to appreciate. In the first year of my masters degree, I wrote a short paper titled On the Temporal Aesthetics of Patience in which I explored this sentiment. I wrote: 

Along with this heightened sense of sight and sound, there is of course the sense of smell, and that undeniable scent of darkroom chemistry completes this sensory experience. Also is the measured movement of other bodies within this darkened space and the hushed conversations that the darkness seems to illicit. In the darkroom, there is that immediate sense of a phenomenological communion between one’s consciousness and the creative space itself. But at the centre of it all is the social inter-subjectivity of the students. So much of the learning experience benefits from this confluence between the social, subjective, and experiential realms. It’s really impossible to replicate it in an online setting.

During the pandemic, the absence of all these things has undeniably had an impact on the health and mental wellbeing of students. As educators, it’s now even more important to create a holistic learning experience that recognises the individual learner and their collaborative contributions in order to mitigate some of the more impersonal and alienating aspects of online learning.

AM—I do. This radical shift, which happened at such an accelerated rate, seems to have not only distorted our sense of time but perhaps our relationship to prior modes of learning. Perhaps the physical objects and documents used to facilitate learning now will more quickly become artefacts and relics. This reverence for obsolete hand-made and/or physically interactive objects is something I am fascinated with, clearly.

A Room with a View: In video

Bohr 2020

by
Ali McCann

Press the play button below to join us for a metaphysical journey of McCann’s room with a view. Thank you everyone who attended the live stream with McCann to discuss Bohr 2020. To watch a recording of our conversation, please scroll down.

 Live stream recording with McCann

Please refer below for a recording of our conversation. Thank you for supporting us.

Biography

Ali McCann (Naarm / Melbourne) is preoccupied with the constructed nature of photography and the possibilities of creating alternate visual and psychological realities through the mode of still-life. Her aesthetics derive from outdated art history pocket guides, 1970s art-and-design text books, photographic instruction manuals, old amateur photography magazines, and also from the high school interiors of my adolescence. Nostalgic imagery and the representations of memory intersect ambiguously with the theoretical notions of visual perception and the aesthetics of education.

Since the early 2000s McCann has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and regional Victoria. Recent solo exhibitions include Having an Experience / Energy Organisation, St Francis, Melbourne (2019),  Οι νέοι, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2019), Masks for Magicians, Caves, Melbourne (2018); Polytechnic, Tristian Koenig, Melbourne, (2018),  An Introduction to Liminal Aesthetics, c3 contemporary art space, Melbourne (2017), and Throwing off the Hump, Kings Artist Run, Melbourne (2017). Recent group exhibitions include National Photography Prize, MAMA Murray Art Museum, Albury (2020) and Still Life Pt. III, Lon Gallery, Melbourne (2019).

She holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts along with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the Victorian College of the Arts and a Graduate Diploma of Education, all from the University of Melbourne. She currently teaches photographic studies and Art History at an art and design college in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria (AUS).

←  Back to Artist List