Nicola Loder
Nicola Loder explores the unstable qualities of photographs in her work. Like memory, time, vision and ideology, photography is shown to be a slippery thing. In her long-term series, Tourist, Loder digitally manipulates photographs to alter their conceptual frame. Tourist: Blind Child 1-6 (2005) features a series of blurred and brightly coloured photographic portraits of blind children. The hallucinatory quality of these photographs destabilizes and disrupts our expectations of photographic vision, and generates a sense of movement within the frozen photographic moment.
The series, Tourist: i am not a hula girl, i am not a dog (2005), draws on the personal photographic archives of a now deceased couple who once travelled around the world together. In each photograph, the hula girl, the dog and its owner are variously transformed into a psychedelic void while the beach and backyard in which they are located remain untouched. Mimicking the fetishistic quality of photographs themselves, these manipulated forms simultaneously allude to, and provide a substitute for, the absent photographed subject.
