Aidan Gageler

Generous images: the work of Aidan Gageler
Essay by Benjamin Clay

Aidan Gageler employs analogue processes to produce abstract photographs, allowing traditional substrates and exhausted chemistry to lend their quirks and failures to each image. Made without a camera, these works avoid being read as pictures or symbols. Instead, they offer the possibility of experience and feeling, affordances commonly offered by music, but rarely visual art. 

In A History of Light 2016 Junko Theresa Mikuriya notes that photography is “only the material manifestation of that which has always existed.” The philosopher names light, time, and chemistry as these eternal ingredients and recognises our age-old urge to summon them as seen in Western theology. Assuming this speculative approach, Gageler employs old apparatuses to bypass familiar ways of seeing, and locate his image-making in an alternate trajectory. The avant-garde gesture of looking back to move forwards is of immense interest to the artist. Despite the perception that expanded photography is peripheral to representational and documentary approaches, it in fact predated and pre-empted the latter.

By reclaiming this history, the artist allows for an inscriptive, rather than descriptive, kind of imaging whereby photographs are made, not taken. They are conjured into being, unlike their lens-based counterparts, which capture and shoot their subjects. Such tactics ensure that the resulting images are without a referent (scenes or happenings from which they derive) and exist as primary subject/objects in and of themselves. Gageler’s darkroom, therefore, becomes the site of event-making and its simultaneous documenting. In this instance, he must rely primarily on touch, so as not to prematurely expose the light-sensitive substrates. The image-maker draws on their other senses, over the privileging of sight that has characterised Modern image and knowledge-making. 

The Giver offers its audience an encounter with photography in its most immediate form, inscribed only by light, time, and chemistry. The work celebrates the medium’s capacity to be self-reflexive and prioritise its own object over those accumulated by the world around it. The series’ title is taken from a 1993 novel by American writer Lois Lowry. In her book, Lowry creates a world devoid of emotional investment, described strictly in black and white. Colour is introduced gradually to the story after one character finds themselves able to hold space for more complex feelings beyond those reduced to a simple binary. Glimpses of possibility are revealed as the protagonist learns how to occupy a vulnerable space, shy of certainty and apathy.

Like Lowry, Gageler celebrates the opportunity inherent within this premise and the character’s willingness to be exposed to life’s poetry. Following his first interaction with the novel in high school, the artist returned to it as a young adult and recognised its renewed relevance. As a series of non-objective photographs, The Giver offers us a series of doorways into our own minds.

How the amorphous surfaces are perceived differently by their various audiences is of endless fascination for Gageler, who himself notes their dual operation as things to see and portals to see through. Built into this duality is the potential for failure, should a particular work yield no response from its viewer. This susceptibility is intrinsic to darkroom photography, which is constituted in part by periods of latency that reveal intended or unexpected results. In its failure to obtain even the slightest likeness, The Giver offers up the opportunity for unhurried revelations over time. 

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