A DIALOGUE between the language, of cinema and that of still images is a central plank of Clare Langan's photographic odyssey, Track.
Wormholing its way between Pool beg and the landscape of rural Iceland, popping up before the Manhattan shoreline, emerging from dreamy, deepblue, waters, striding across marginal zones of scrub grass, a lone figure maps the world, or at least a world.
Langan's telling of this journey of a faceless avatar uses long, cinematic picture ratios, soft focuses and strong cot our filters, often intensified with a Fauvey frame of darkness. Below the darkness, a figure swims up into an industrial nightmare riverbank made unaccustomedly seductive by a cloudy ultramarine filter. Water edges another set of images in which the familiar Manhattan shoreline is recoloured in lemons and limes and framed almost as though seen through a car window.
Langan is working with an intriguing notion, but there is undeniable unevenness to this work, something emphasised by its presentation. "Floating" photographic images off the wall, raising them slightly from the surface to give them some extra force as objects, has become a cliche as overpowering as any gold stucco frame. Here it seems to be used as reflex rather than for any convincing purpose, the material element in this way also throws attention on to the mounting of the photographs on wood rather than on metal. The slightly ephemeral appearance this lends to the work may be Langan's choice and may have something to do with the cinematic model she follows, but it nevertheless interferes with any sense of a thoroughness in her execution.
