Picture imperfect
Platform’s new photo exhibit serves up disturbing images art review
Kristen Pauch-Nolin

The show To Hold One’s Breath, by British artists Emma Critchley and Danny Treacy, is visually dark and conceptually strange, a stark reminder that art can have an intense emotional impact on its audience.

The exhibition features 12 chilling photographs that have been described by viewers as both “profoundly disturbing” and “remarkably moving.”

Conceptually, To Hold One’s Breath explores issues surrounding self-preservation, vulnerability, anonymity and fetishism. Disrupting any sense of time or space with their lack of identifiable context, the pieces offer a host of unusual characters that are as intriguing as they are complex. Catching the viewer’s attention with penetrating gazes or their unusual costumes, the photographed subjects offer absolutely no insight into their character.

By intentionally shrouding their work in mystery, Critchley and Treacy create the perfect environment for speculation. Compounded by the works’ dark colours, high-contrast lights and unusual appearances, audiences are easily encouraged to both imagine and speculate about source and meaning.

Treacy’s work includes a series of four large-scale Inkjet images, each of a single figure dressed in a peculiar assortment of clothing. Unusually arranged on the body, various articles are pieced together to form continuous garments. With pants functioning as sleeves, work boots combined with high-heeled shoes, and heads/faces concealed beneath an assortment of unusual apparatus, the fully cloaked bodies resemble genuinely terrifying scarecrows.

The exhibition’s interpretive materials reveal that the photos’ subject is “in fact Treacy who has found the clothes and accessories in places where events of intense pain or pleasure have taken place, such as in one case, the scene of a car crash.” Many of the clothing articles are suspiciously marked and stained with what one might speculate is blood, bullet holes or drag marks.

Coming to morbid and completely fictional conclusions is as easily achieved when viewing Critchley’s work. Her exhibit is a series of eight somewhat more traditional portraits, each including a lone figure photographed from the waist up. Awkwardly positioned, the subjects are posed with expressionless faces, extremely pale flesh and blank eyes. None appear to be breathing, suggesting the possibility that they’re all corpses.

In reality, Critchley’s subjects are alive — they have simply been photographed underwater. Again, the exhibition’s text provides the explanation: “Upon inspection one notices the white dress shirts each subject wears appears to be floating around the body, faces are lifted and breath is held.”

Viewed without the support of the gallery’s interpretive materials, To Hold One’s Breath is full of possibilities that challenge the imagination and evoke a variety of emotional responses, suggesting that in this case the provision of less information creates an exciting opportunity for audiences to come to their own bizarre and exciting conclusions.