‘Meantime’ by David Stephenson

Butler Gallery is pleased to present ‘Meantime’, a mixed media exhibition combining photography and film by David Stephenson with a selection of poetry by Mark Granier.

The central theme of ‘Meantime’ is transience and the spirit of passing, life’s marginality. As Seamus Heaney put it in his poem, Postscript, ‘You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass…’.

Such things include, in this instance, damaged or fragmentary photographs from photo albums, the root-plates of upturned trees, net curtains in an abandoned house that might suggest a phantom wood. Stephenson has always been drawn to the idea of a house as a soundbox, a witness to the lives that were shaped by that particular arrangement of walls and surfaces, windows, the faces that peered through those windows and what they looked out on. Houses generally outlast us. Compared to a house and its furnishings, we are ephemeral, speeded-up films, shadows in mirrors. The idea of a presence in absence is a central theme.

His portraits of people embody a kind of stillness and private reverie. a fascination with that contradictory aspect of existence: its ephemerality and its solidity, ghosts, memories and erasures.

Granier’s poems do not interpret or comment on the films or photographs, but compliment them tonally, encounters that are in the same orbit. Like Stephenson, he has always been drawn to resonant images that possess the ability to haunt and linger.    

Stephenson’s aim is to create works that connect through their earthiness and vulnerability, convergences of mortality and sensuality. As Susan Sontag wrote: “All photographs are memento mori. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

The exhibition will be installed at the Butler Gallery as a series of visual thoughts or memories. Unframed photographs of varying sizes will be interspersed with Granier’s poetry. Some images will stand alone; others will appear in groups, and the narrative connections linked by the barest of threads.

Please see more info on the Butler Gallery website.