NIGEL Rolfe began making photographs relating to the performance side of his work some years ago. At first these images - like those in the Resonator show - featured objects used in the course of live work and were intended as something of a record.
Gradually, over the years, these photographs began to develop an increasingly complex relationship with Rolfe's live work.
In his photography, Rolfe has developed a symbolic language that seems hard and emphatic at first, but later reveals itself as something more fluid and complex.
A characteristic approach has been to use images and objects that seem already almost overburdened with literary and symbolic resonances, and quietly disrupt those meanings.
Field of Dreams, Rolfe's last show at the Green on Red, was centred on the lily, and the new show, La Rosa, as the title might suggest, also features a symbolically overburdened flower.
With just five colour images (of 2 ft square) and two monochromes, this is a compact, determinedly unblustery show. A shift away from the more readily impressive size of his usual photoworks introduces a new, unfamiliar note of claustrophobia into the show.
The stiff reduction in scale also has another important effect.
As these images feel terse, even, occasionally clipped, they "readily assert their place as denatured fragment of a larger body of work.
What is interesting here is that without knowledge of the performances, only a very specific part of each image's significance is available. It is as though all the bass and midrange frequencies had been removed from a piece of music, leaving the strange, insistent rhythm of high hats dominating.
The impression that these images are "sampled" seems to draw attention to the limitations of any single image, while at the same time underlining the liberties and opportunities working in this way provides.
Bandaged Rose, a clone up of the head of a rose as it is being bound in white gauze, registers immediately as an evocation of a wound, any sense of certainty, of a strict, formal correspondence, soon dissolves.
Equally Vase, an image of a rose springing from the sound hole of guitar, exhibits an immediate resonance with cubism, but seems to bounce quickly away from such bland art historical significance, into more complex territory.