Mark Soo

Mark Soo:


Mark Soo

Work from his oeuvre.

“Mark Soo’s work focuses on the associations between culture, technology and the history of representation, and their impact on questions of subjectivity.

Soo’s current exhibition “Madame Guillotine” is concerned with relations of image production and photography, as seen through depictions of the guillotine and associated images dating from the French Revolution. Sourced through digital archives and local libraries, these reproductions of 18th and 19th century etchings have been rephotographed digitally on a low-res mobile phone, which in turn have been enlarged and printed in a traditional analog photographic darkroom. In a final layering of images, a photogram of various objects has been printed on top of the digital image.

Co-existing on the picture plane as a single exposure, each work is a compression of multiple modes of image making, material and metaphor. Magnified digital noise, darkroom processing, and crisp photogram silhouettes interact with each other simultaneously. Together, they trace histories and frictions ranging from the etching to the printed page, from the analog to the digital, and from a collective understanding of public images to the limits of a single photo. Echoing this transition between regimes of image production are the pictures that depict the guillotine, and fragments of the profound social changes that transformed the monarchy of the French Ancien Régime to the uncertain modernities of a democratic republic. ” – Art News