Solo exhibition by photography Jim Naughten at Home House: In collaboration with The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery
A Space for Art has partnered with The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery to curate a display of work from Jim Naughten’s distinctive photographic series, Eremozoic at Home House.
Biologist E.O. Wilson has suggested that we are now entering the Earth’s Eremozoic period, which he characterises as an age of loneliness following mass extinctions caused by human activity. In contrast with the more commonly used term Anthropocene (or ‘age of man’), Wilson’s classification addresses the history we are living through from a broader ecological perspective, to recognise humanity’s essential and inextricable connectedness with other forms of life on the planet.
In these pictures, Naughten explores the history of this complex relationship, examining how we have attempted to contain nature in both physical structures and cognitive frameworks. Our image of nature is so often partial, refusing to engage with the environment’s overwhelming power and intricacy whilst erasing traces of human culpability from the narrative of our dwindling natural habitat.
To reflect on how this understanding has evolved, Naughten turned to dioramas – displays designed to provide a discrete window onto nature, often used traditionally in exhibitions of natural history.
He uses photography to reanimate their scenes, presented for fresh consideration in a series of defamiliarised pictures. Taking the artful composition of the original dioramas and heightening their colour palette to further exoticise the settings, Naughten has charged these photographs with a sense of illusion. They play to the popular misperception of nature as something that occurs in faraway ‘wild’ places, cut off from our own reality. The camera’s capacity to compress perspective and scale into these seamless representations encourages us to question what we are seeing in the diorama vistas, where their truth begins and our responsibilities have ended.
As we come to terms with the implications of what our new age of loneliness might mean, the need to reclaim nature from its confined imaginative space on the outskirts of our day to day existence has never been more urgent. This series extends an invitation to consider what our world might look like from these new horizons of awareness.
— Lucy Fleming-Brown
The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery was established in London in 1988. Over the ensuing three-and-a-half decades it has established an international reputation for artistic innovation and individuality. The gallery is renowned for championing artists of independent vision and technical excellence across the broad spectrum of contemporary art, including both the Western and the non-Western traditions.
The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery regularly collaborates with public galleries and institutions. It has worked on exhibitions with, and had works acquired by the British Museum, the Barbican Centre, the National Gallery of Australia, and the De Young Museum, San Francisco, amongst others. Along with these aforementioned collaborations, the gallery has relationships with luxury brands across London and internationally. These include Third Space gyms, Firmdale Hotels and Billy Reid.
