Actual Thing
Joe Nickols on Frederika Dalwood
Frederika Dalwood’s solo exhibition Actual Thing at Modern Animals presents new interdisciplinary works that explore the complexities of existing in a world we can never fully trust. Existence is restlessness; we are trapped in landscapes peppered with artefacts belonging to distant historic events whilst scientific and technological breakthroughs tantalise us with unfathomable futures. We are unable to physically experience these contrasting situations. Our surroundings are comprised of contradictory relics and promises of events that are intangible and yet impactful. Dalwood’s digitally manipulated photoscapes explore the surreal existentialist experience of being caught in the middle between deep history and futuristic fantasy.
Dalwood’s photo manipulations are rooted in personal experience and begin life on a beaten-up digital camera from 2008. Through careful selection of objects and locations, Dalwood captures indistinct historical monuments shrouded in mist and close-ups of biological material that, due to scale, appear ambiguous and indescribable. The process of physically experiencing and capturing ancient spaces and objects is far removed from the manipulated images that are created from them. The collaged combinations reverberate with a sense of the uncanny and irrealism. Dalwood’s photoscapes are both recognisable yet incomprehensible, toying with perspective, symbolic connections and modern anxieties.
Shadows play a crucial role in the composition of Dalwood’s images, simultaneously adding realism to the compositions and exposing the impossibility of the scenes. With the dark lines crossing over landscapes in unreal manners, they expose the setting to be little more than shallow stage sets. Deployed in this manner shadows act as a Lacanian quilting point, revealing the phantasmic nature of reality that is assumed to be fixed and knowable. Shadows have been significant in Dalwood’s practice since the beginning, with a key work at the 2023 Slade School of Art MA degree show utilising an image of the subsolar point. The subsolar point is an area of the world where the sun is perpendicular to the earth and no object can cast shadows, creating an illusion of augmented digital reality despite being real. From this image, Dalwood established the importance of light, and particularly shadows, for humans to distinguish between fact and digitally generated content. The physical intangibility of a shadow mirrors the impact of technology on our society. Despite the internet’s untouchability the digital age has left no stone or landscape unscarred, from the environmental impact of server farms to the way people are (over)stimulated in their formally familiar surroundings. The rapid implementation of AI in society has induced a wave of social anxiety concerned with human survival, quality of life and truthfulness.
Dalwood reflects further on these anxieties with the absence of people in the compositions. The overlaid manmade objects hint at an undefined and unconfirmed culture that occupied these spaces, forcing the viewer to ask about the object’s creation. The objects are sourced from visits to churches, history museums and scientific spaces, each proclaiming different truths of our world. These truths coalesce uneasily in Dalwood’s work creating tension. In each photoscape there is an unnerving recognisability that can never be fully known, with Dalwood leaving the viewer to interrogate the certainty of their own worlds.
Joe Nickols is a curator at the British Museum (Japan Section).