Materialising the Abstract
Text by Kandace Siobhan Walker
Essay title ‘Excerpt from Materialising The Abstract’, commissioned by the Iirsh Photo Network
Chad Alexander’s Entries explores historical-geographical relationships through portraits and urban landscapes. Departing from Cummins’ method of using self-portraiture as an excavation tool, Alexander photographs other people, upon whose faces and bodies the legacies of conflict mirrored in their immediate environments appear. Alexander’s images are frequently dark or taken at night, and his subjects often do not meet the camera’s eye. In Jamie, two images in one spliced horizontally create a doubling effect; its subject, a woman surrounded by greenery, turns away. The lush variety of its environment, grouped with the mystery of the subject—her wristwatch, repeated, as her main identifying feature—and the moodiness of its palette—reminiscent of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro—lends the image a suggestive, baroque atmosphere.
A tension between where we stand and what we can see runs throughout Alexander’s work: the clean lines demarcating the edges of shadows in RIP Decky are disrupted by light flooding the end of an alleyway, a light that also draws attention to the mournful titular graffiti on a distant wall. In another image taken in an alleyway at night, Entry & My Shadow, an interplay of shadows of deepening solidity—the rectangular blocks thrown by houses underneath the light-shuttered shadow of a fence underneath the photographer’s own, partially-visible shadow—further contributes to a sense of revelation and, conversely, secrecy.
Burnt War Mural stands apart from the rest of the series, depicting text and image shrouded by a baleful, crackled burn mark. The heart of the burn, where it is darkest, appears like an entryway, as if a window into somewhere else beyond the mural. This intimation of spaces beyond the spaces we can see recurs throughout the series. As in Faux House, where a real house rises through the frame, its lower windows boarded up and the glass of its upper windows smashed. However, it isn’t the house that the photographer grants his focus, but a cluster of sparse, yet fruitful branches in the foreground. In its presentation of a depersonalised yet intimate human geography, Entries refrains from judging its subjects—instead preferring to critique the act of witness.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Chad Alexander's Entries to Northern Ireland
Text excerpt by Sophie Wright, published by The British Journal of Photography.
From the dimly-lit back alleys of Belfast, right into the interiors of its inhabitants’ homes, Chad Alexander’s graduation project Entries takes us on a reflective journey through the streets where he grew up.
The result is a collection of quiet landscapes, portraits and interiors of people’s homes and places that he knows intimately: a personal vision that bridges the past and present of a city indelibly marked by three decades of conflict… Combining formal portraiture with hallucinatory double exposures, Alexander shot the project on a second-hand camera that turned out to be faulty. Embracing these elements of chance and unpredictability added a conceptual dimension to the work, allowing him to embed the fragmentation and violence of Northern Ireland’s recent past in the very form of the photographs.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Source Magazine
Text by Ivy Lahon, Graduate selection, Source Magazine
In 'Entries', Chad Alexander explores the obscure back streets, dead-ends and confined spaces that constitute the underbelly of contemporary Belfast. Giving us a sense of the past, his moody and atmospheric landscapes and portraits enchant the viewer. His work invites us into a world of the hidden and hints at remnants of violence, as well as present and ongoing subjugation and suppression. The use of double exposures are a contemporary approach to giving the viewer a sense of the past and time overlapping. The use of natural light and shadows are ethereal and imply an inherent clandestine underworld which engages and intrigues.