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The Nominees Catherine Yass | Fiona Banner | Keith Tyson | Liam Gillick Catherine Yass: double-take Catherine Yass (39) was born in London. She graduated from Slade School of Art in 1986 and completed an MA at Goldsmiths College in 1990. After a commissioned video work for Walsall's New Gallery in 2000 she had her first solo exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery, London, in 2001. Like the earlier photo-artist Man Ray, whose famous polarised 'halo' around an image first occurred when a technician opened the darkroom door at the wrong moment, Catherine Yass discovered her signature style by accident. She takes two photographs, one after the other, of the same subject - usually architecture - often using hand-held filters. The disjunction in time and any other variables are compounded when she processes one shot as a negative colour image and one as a positive, and then presents a composite image as a transparency. Something eerie happens to the colours in this process. Edges fog and appear to bleed their chemical hues into one another, pulsating with a viral energy. Light areas of the photograph become an often intense blue, and the whole image is further intensified by being back-lit by the light-box in which it is presented. Yass's tightly-cropped, claustrophobic images of Japanese capsule hotels, such as Capsule (506) (1999), look as artificially vibrant as the highly charged Akihabara 'Electrical City' district of Tokyo. Descent HQ3 (2002) offers a dizzy and disorientating view of Canary Wharf, photographed from high up on a crane, and takes the viewer swooping down through the lens. Psychological space The artist's photographs of corridors from a Victorian psychiatric hospital in Surrey, which is still in use, are currently on display at London's Tate Modern. In photography's infancy (which was still in the days of the Victorian 'asylum'), photographers were employed by doctors to capture the physiognomy or facial structure of their patients, hoping that the camera's mechanical precision would throw light on the condition of the subjects. Yass has approached her subject quite differently. Her empty, oddly hued institutional spaces seem to hum and buzz in the mind - perhaps with the electricity of imagined ECT machines, or with the echoes of voices down the years. We are placed within the corridor, following the footsteps of generations of patients. Through the camera lens, we occupy the empty psychological spaces Yass explores. Her technique in these works presents photography at its most chemical, and colour at its most relative, being created in the mind - as we know it really is - from lightwave frequencies. Commissioned by the British Council for the recent Indian Triennial, Yass combined her particular vision of empty architectural spaces with the more traditional art of portraiture. The series of lightbox-mounted transparencies that make up the work Star (2001) present images of the increasingly fashionable celebrities of Indian cinema. These are exhibited next to photographs of the empty cinemas that the stars will eventually fill with their screen presence. The technique seems to give the actors an oddly fitting sense of unreality and emphasises the often blurred distinction between the person and the icon. |
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