Clara Adolphs SILENT REPLY

“Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”1

“Perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of myth. The Photograph... puts an end to this resistance: henceforth the past is as certain as the present, what we see on paper is as certain as what we touch.”2

I like to think that everything exists all at once. Or everything that has existed, still exists. My objective is to make these photographs alive, now. I ask the question, what is the truer evidence of time, the photo or the painting?

My work has a performative element- it must work in that moment in time; I paint quickly and move on from paintings just a quickly if they are not working.

The nature of the photograph is that it is repeated and reproduced, I am continuing this process. The repetition of paintings originally comes from my studio practice, the process of remaking a painting from a singular image over and over, attempting to get to the essence of that moment in time pictured in the photograph. I have recently begun to reflect that practice in my exhibitions.

Most paintings in this exhibition have a ‘pair’ or ‘partner’. But as a group reflect a larger composition and world that I have created. I make paintings of images that can be quite disparate, from different origins and places, and people. I link them together through this imagined landscape that I create.