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Indepth Arts News:
"Stephen Hughes: Photographs"
2002-01-12 until 2002-02-23
Focal Point Gallery
Southend-On-Sea, ,
UK United Kingdom
Buildings as apparitions, gleaming white apartment blocks stranded by the
shore, lone figures drifting and daydreaming across the barren edges of
newly built cities. Such scenes dominate the powerful new photographs of
Stephen Hughes. In this major solo exhibition Hughes introduces an
outstanding body of work produced over the last four years at sites all over
Europe.
Hughes photographs are dedicated to the peripheral, marginal zones and
strange disconnected gaps of our contemporary social landscape. In these
places people often betray the ambiguous signs of despair and longing: a
family hold hands as they peer over Beachy Head, edging towards oblivion;
the sci-fi architecture of Atomium in Brussels looms over a young couple as
they embrace in a featureless park; and a child lays prone, gazing through
the glass roof of Sunderland's Glass Museum.
Many of Hughes's images reveal coastal sites, misty windblown places of
loneliness and reverie that seem to harbour the residues of both nature and
culture. Here are architectural visions that have run aground on rocky
outcrops; semi-developed ore extravagant and incongruous, the buildings
become metaphors for a human psychology of disenchantment, of dreams washed
away by the sea.
Stephen Hughes: Photographs has been organised by De La Warr Pavilion in
collaboration with Photoworks.
IMAGE:
Stephen Hughes,
Sunderland, England, 1998
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