Gods and Demons of the Forest @Embassy (2015)

Jane Hughes
Gods & Demons of the forest

18.06 – 27.06.2014

Opening:
Wednesday June 18, 6-9 p.m.
Kilkenny beer with kind support of Embassy of Ireland, Sweden

Live Music: Coca Cola 3 at 7.30pm

DETROIT STOCKHOLM
Roslagsgatan 21
Stockholm

Opening Hours:
Tuesday-Friday 2-6pm
(Closed for Midsummer 20th June)

Detroit Stockholm is pleased to present ‘Gods and Demons of the Forest’, a solo exhibition of new work by Jane Hughes. In the exhibition, Hughes presents a series of new drawings and video works produced with material from a hunting camera, which she placed in the forest for 30 consecutive days and nights in May and June during her recent residency at RUD A-I-R Sweden.

“…and your flashlight’s beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it over corrects then centers on what you’d felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as you’d so carefully panned the light and looked, a face in the floor there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you…” (‘Infinite Jest’, David Foster Wallace, 1996)

The backdrop for Hughes’ new work is remote landscapes, depopulated areas, and dense forests. She is particularly interested in the expansion of daylight hours, the ritual of day turning to night and night turning to day which she captures with time lapse photography. But of equal importance is also all that happens in between in the darkness, when the unseen can only be felt. She strives to achieve this sensation with drawing, aiming to lure the viewer into this intimate space. Simultaneously, she explores the limits and synergies of the photographs and drawings. The images that Hughes retrieves, in themselves are used as reference and sources for development of inverse black and white drawing both large and small in scale and infrared stop motion time lapse video work. The artist uses the technology of the infra-red camera as a tool to experiment with modes of representation, abstraction and expression, melting lines between drawing, photography and video. Hughes has always been interested in destabilizing mediums, assessing the limits and experimenting with materiality, where one can delve into mystery, loose metaphors and free associations, a possible intersection of desires and fears, gods and demons.

Installation views, Jane Hughes, Gods & Demons of the forest, Detroit Stockholm, Stockholm, SE, 2014.

Jane Hughes
Gods & Demons of the forest ii

Embassy of Ireland, Berlin.

11.12.2014 – 10.02.2015

Opening: Wednesday December 10th , 6-9 p.m.

The Embassy of Ireland, Berlin is pleased to present Gods & Demons of the Forest, a solo exhibition of recent work by Jane Hughes. Hughes presents a series of black and white drawings produced through daily rituals of drawing during two artist residencies in May to June 2014 in Rud Air in Sweden and November to December 2014 in Rasi Air in Finland.

She captures with time lapse photography thousands of images of the ritual of day turning to night and night turning to day as source material for drawings. Her method involves changing the camera location daily through meandering in the forest searching for interesting locations.

Hughes’s works deal with themes of place and belonging. She is influenced by the idea of psychogeography of place, defined by Guy Debord (1955) as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. The artist, who was born and grew up in a mild Irish climate where one could say seasons blend into each without much change, is driven by a curiosity to experience the Nordic landscapes where seasons and light changes are strongly felt.

Through the process of drawing, and spending longer periods of time in rural Sweden and Finland leading up to the summer and winter solstice she aims at making visible these significant markers of time, the rhythms and cycles of seasons and the experience of unique dreamy ever expanding daylight hours and its opposite the acceleration of complete darkness of winter months.