Simon Kavanagh is a graphic artist with a broad, international education. He studied at the National College of Art and Design in Ireland, receiving a joint degree in teaching a visual communications. After graduating college, he spent two years studying and developing his artistic identity in Paris. Following this span of time, Simon then moved to Shanghai to teach Chinese students for three years. Now, he is back in Europe. His broad range of experiences and education has left him the a diverse collection of works.
The work that had caught my eye on Rhizome was the Paris night Blur series. Abstract paintings and pictures have always interested me, and Kavanagh had created this piece without a digital aid. That is a concept which I had found interesting as so much of our discussion in class revolves around how artwork is now digitally manipulated and even something which looks natural has no doubt been altered. This photograph was not altered after, the distortion of the image taking place in the present as the photograph was snapped. We often use cameras to try and capture what is in front of us, to preserve a moment or a memory. The concept of trying to capture such a distorted image proves interesting to me.
Traveling is one of my passions, although I haven't quite the money to indulge it at this point. Recently, in class, we discussed how one uses a camera while on travel to try and preserve a memory or instance. Often times, they want to show others, but it means more to them than anyone else. A picture is more than just an image, but representative of an experience or feeling to the person who took it. At least, that is the way I look at pictures. Simon Kavanagh has lived in many places and has captured them on film in a way that goes along with this mindset.
They are all slightly distorted or abstract in some way, shape, or form. We may look at them one way, but I don't doubt that they hold a certain meaning for him that we may not be able to extract ourselves. He invites the viewer to guess where the pictures had been taken. They are all random and, I think, quite realistic to how photographs turn out when one is on travel, trying to capture whatever random moment they can, to preserve it for later. This is one of my favorites. Its composure is interesting artistically, the foreground some sort of lattice, clean and crisp (even somewhat dainty), while the background is in ruin. Nobody would be able to decipher where the picture is from without an explanation. It just comments on how pictures are just part of a story, and do not function as the whole story in themselves.
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