3 Exhibitions

Overview

Four shows at Gaffa focus on half-seen worlds and the sort blurry places that can overwhelm the eyes. Armando Chant's Phase Change is dominated by a series of etchings of Banksia, shifting in and out of focus. The plates seem to have been progressively eaten away by the acid process between printings. Some have a sculptor's eye for detail. On others, the picture has faded until only rough dots or distant hazy forms remain.  Arranged as a grid, the eye moves down the rows and the images dissolve. The clear topmost row of images denature down through a middle splodgy row to a lower one where almost nothing is left but soft, lumpen forms.

At photo collective the Photo Group's show Eight Andrea Klucis' Where Land Meets the Sky shows a strip of a city ridge specked with trees and houses. Just above, it's touched by low rough clouds, under the bulk of the photo dominated by an endless sky. Its series of photos, Sometimes Sweet Silence, are each dominate by the 'golden hour' of light after the dawn, or before sunset. Asim Aly-Khan's Homeworlds of the Holograms makes globes from shaky streaks of light, while Mirjana Tann plays with lens flares spiking off the sun in When Darkness Lifes. Caroline McLean Foldes' domestic moments in Clifton Gardens - Home dot tiny cameos with gentle light, Mim Stirling's El retablo de los animalitos (The Altar of Little Animals) offers intimate photo portraits of tiny animal toys and Philipa Margan's lens gives M&Ms the sort of loving treatment that makes you realise how much their strange granary shape and rough aftertaste had always deserved such treatment.

Plan is a joint show divided among A.W. and Kim Connerton. A.W. has images of frames within frames, empty boxes and a hollow plinth alongside correspondence between early photographers Fox Talbot and Herschel. It's a kind of unearthed bones from the world of early photography. Lotuses are the theme of Connerton's tiny sculptures, where miniature people aim to draw you into a pre-birth world.

Images by Andrea Klucis and Philipa Margan.