urban harvest: built reflections

15 - 28 july, 2011
david giles gallery fremantle

"Image harvesting is my creative work, my meditation, my play. I am at my best when all three come together. I work towards stillness, patience, clarity of vision, and regaining a sense of child-like wonder.

Most often I am playing seriously.

"Play includes a range of self-chosen activities, undertaken for their own interest, enjoyment and the satisfaction that results." [Play Information Service, 2002].

While I usually play at image harvesting alone, sharing the harvest completes the process.

urban harvest evolves a theme from my firewater exhibition in 2010: recording that which goes unnoticed, is ephemeral, and can quicken the heart. The naturally occurring abstract images - generated by city glass reflecting off glass - reveal secrets of a visual world, neglected above our gaze, yet in plain view. I hope these images surprise you, evoke pleasure and communicate some of the beauty in play."

Mark Pearson 2011

For a preview of a selection of artworks from the exhibition, please visit the urban harvest gallery.
Further information is also included below in the essay Mark Pearson The Seen Unseen by David Giles.

Urban Harvest: Built Reflections Abstract photography by Mark Pearson
Preview: Thursday 14 July 2011
Opening night: 6.30pm, Friday 15 July 2011
Exhibition continues until Thursday 28 July 2011
David Giles Gallery, 49B HIgh Street Fremantle
Gallery Hours: Tues - Fri: 1 - 6pm, Sat + Sun: 11am - 5pm
For inquiries and opening invitations please contact Mark.

Mark Pearson The Seen Unseen by David Giles
[Artist + Director of the David Giles Art Gallery Fremantle]

Mark Pearson provides us with images of the seen unseen. By this I mean his work brings to our attention that which can be seen but which we normally do not see. In this sense his concept of harvesting images is appropriate to the process of trawling or harvesting the actual reality around us, to present it to us in a way in which we are confronted with what seems unseen or not previously seen. Pearson’s images in this context are startling. We have all seen reflections in the glass windows of skyscrapers but few I think would have seen what Pearson show us. His photographs show us the discernment and dedication of an artist committed to searching, researching and constantly looking with fresh eyes with what is there for us all to see but which few us of us have our eyes open to discern.

Pearson describes his artistic practice as a form of meditation and one can see in the images a profound sense of stillness, the capturing of the eternal moment, now, the only time that actually exists and a sense of the exquisite beauty that can be found in such moments if we have our eyes wide open. As well as startling us into seeing the unseen, Pearson’s photographic images are also abstract art works and like abstract paintings take us into the pure form of colour shape and texture and the evocation of subtle moods, dispositions, auras and feeling that flow from these forms. In these images we can find fire, water and earth, elements that reflect and evoke human emotion and take us into the full spectrum of feelings of the human psyche.

There is also in these works the trail of someone on a literal journey, both in time and place. The titles of the images take us into this journey as we accompany the artist into places familiar or unfamiliar but always with an unfamiliar perspective. In this way the journey we are taken on is exotic. It takes us deep into a reframing of the world as we see it to see the world with fresh new eyes, eyes that can see what is normally missed, normally unseen and show us hidden secrets and treasures of the world all around us.

Common to many of Pearson’s images is the form of the ripple. This archetypal form engenders both the infinity of time found in the ripples of geology and the sense of turning all that is solid to water. An eternal symbol of human emotion, water, and the ripples Pearson conjures out of the world around us, take us into deep emotion, into the liquidity and fluidity of the ocean within, the ocean of the oceanic that connects us all and connects us to all that is and has ever been and ever will be. In this way Pearson’s images are meditations on the mystical, on the oceanic, on the timelessness and eternity of the very first act of creation rippling down the time space continuum and into the images Pearson presents to us.

Thus even though Pearson’s images are grounded in the literal, concrete reality we are all familiar with, his abstraction from that reality, his harvesting of images, takes us into a cosmic dimension, into a dimension that wavers and ripples through the unseen seen to show us a freedom, a vision of the potential to look at things differently.

This also reflects Pearson’s profession as a counsellor and his use of expressive art therapies in settings of personal and therapeutic development and discovery. As Pearson says, image harvesting is his creative work, his meditation, his play. The vision he provides the rest of us, can shock us into a sense of how little we see, how much we see is unseen until prompted by artists such as Pearson, and perhaps can prompt us to open our eyes a little wider and perhaps open our minds and our hearts too, to the unseen potential of the world around us, to a reclaiming as Pearson puts it, of that sense of child-like wonder.

In doing so, Pearson provides us a great service, returning to us our birthright to see what is unseen, to reveal to us “secrets of a visual world, neglected above our gaze, yet in plain view.” In doing so, he gives us the freedom to look anew, to find whatever hope, clarity, faith, dreams or aspirations we might seek, simply by opening our eyes, child like to the world around us.

David Giles 2011