David Gates’ first solo exhibition in Greece, entitled fig. (i)  relates to the systems of referral between the images and the descriptions used in the scientific manuals and old natural history books, which are often used as the starting point and source of much of the work. These outdated sources of information, sometimes modified sometimes not highlight an interest in their obsession with order and totality and the impossibility of rationalising the objective world around us.

 

David Gates works with pinhole photography, found images and objects. Pinhole images, far from being nostalgic, authenticate the present, making it vibrant and shimmering by pushing the not too distant past away, opening up the future to the possibility of possibilities.

 

Being a Qbox resident artist during a month on the island of Kea, Greece, Gates used a small van as a travelling darkroom, peering over fences, dodging shadows and scouring the roadsides. Finding usefulness in the neglected, the everyday and overlooked. Paying attention to the edges and in some cases eliminating the focus of a photograph in a book page, photographing overgrown trees which have long outlived their original plan or usefulness, or flattening a feather, removing its featheriness whilst allowing it to cling on to its undeniable objectness. These things seem to stand in for the objects or ideas that they actually are.

 

The artist does not look for certain results to prove a theory and to make a virtue of trial and error, instead he plays at the border between the visible and invisible, somewhere in between things and meanings, between representations and actual things. He poses questions as an activity, uses method as a meaning and tries to open up a space for looking or relooking by removing images and things from the flow of time towards their inevitable disappearance.

 

David Gates (born 1979, Essex, UK) lives and works in Essex, UK. He studied Printmaking at Winchester School of Art (1999-2002) and completed a Masters Degree in the same course at UWE, Bristol (2004-2006). Solo exhibitions: The Rural College of Art, Domobaal gallery (2013) More birds of the day, The Toolshed Gallery, Somerset, UK (2012), Sténopé La Librairie Photographique, Paris, France (2010). Selected group exhibitions: The Spring Exhibition, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2012), Your Garden is Looking a Mess Could You Please Tidy it up, Payne Shurvell, London (2011), Known, Unknown, Anonymous and On Death Row, Qbox gallery, Athens, Greece (2011).

 

Qbox Residency Program was inaugurated in the summer of 2007 and takes place on the island of Kea. It is tailored to artists as well as to art critics and curators. The gallery offers room and board, a studio and a solo exhibition at Qbox Gallery in Athens at the culmination of the residency.

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