Daniel Rapley - Drift Part 2
Daniel Rapley’s Drift series has been made from a collection of over 20,000 35mm slide transparencies, sourced from house clearances. Each artwork is made by the artist selecting two slides that are stacked on top of each other, which is then photographed on a light box and a new print is made. The energy that is captured by one image being layered on top of another has become a visual language that Rapley has developed through many hours of search, selection and judgement. There is no manipulation. This is an exhaustive process where identifying two slides that resonate, is everything.
The work has been made over a 5 year period, against the backdrop of his late 104 year old grandmother’s slow decline with dementia. The work became a vehicle for him to consider the malleable nature of memory, as well as how photography colludes with memory construction and recall.
These found images comprise people’s memories that are compressed together to create hybrid images that are both familiar, pictorial but ultimately distant. The result is a series of unpredictable outcomes, where the artist employs the smallest of control mechanisms and allows choice, chance but ultimately judgement to determine the final works.
From a purely aesthetic perspective they ignite a language of colour that can only be derived from a photographic process. The light is spectral, drawing upon spectrums of colour that are specific to transparency slides. But the clash of optical registers creates a layering and texture that is more akin to painting.
For Drift 2 at Beam we have selected a series of work that reference landscape and travel. Images of family holidays and travel are frequently found in the 20,000 slides that Rapley has collected as they are common major events that people choose to record. So there is familiarity, but they are inherently unfamiliar. While the work borrows and reworks found imagery, the result is no longer familiar, but otherworldly.
So, what is this new world? This is a question that is largely open to the viewer. It’s certainly dreamy, it has surreal qualities, it provokes memory, it’s perhaps psychedelic, but more than anything we’re freed from the preconceptions that we apply to artworks or photography. If we look at them as paintings, we look through a lens of history and expectation. if we look at them as photographs, we read the distorted reality contained within the image and bring our opinions and judgement. With Drift, the fundamentals of how we read images or make their judgments are disrupted. This is what makes them fun, intriguing, frustrating, beautiful and profound, all at the same time.
Drift in collaboration with Lakeside Arts
Drift Part 1 - Until 19 May
Daniel Rapley Drift is a collaboration with Lakeside Arts and Drift Part 1, which features a range of similar work and sculptures, can be found at The Angear Visitor Centre, Lakeside Arts, University of Nottingham NG7 2RD.
Open: Tuesday-Saturday 10am–4pm
About the artist
Daniel Rapley is a British artist living and working in Newark, Nottinghamshire. Working predominantly with photography, though not exclusively, Rapley is interested in the role that images play in shaping who we are and how we construct meaning from the World.
Much of his recent work explores the use of found photographic matter, repurposed and re-contextualised. Histories, contexts, producers and meanings overlap and conflate, allowing works produced to become uncanny sites, where authorial certainty has slipped its leash.
His work has featured in group exhibitions at The Barbican, London, Olympic Park, Beijing and Club Solo, Breda and has been reviewed in Frieze, Artists Newsletter and New York Arts. Drift, Rapley’s first book, is published in Spring 2024 by Beam Editions and includes 4 new essays on the artist’s work.