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info@guyarchard.com
About
This body of work is concerned with the everyday banality of places and objects. Guy Archard’s aim is to make viewers reconsider the aesthetic value of things, by showing beauty within seemingly mundane domains. Telephone Boxes, Car Parks, Swimming Pools – he finds these spaces of utility fascinating, as for him their aesthetic qualities are hugely underestimated. Guy is attracted to things that are modest in their visual appeal, yet in one moment can become objects of reverie and fascination.
It is this sudden shift in perspective that he is interested in pursuing. By capturing the transient properties of places, he hopes to demonstrate their provisional changes from the unexceptional to the extraordinary in a fleeting moment.
For his Anonymous Planes series, he photographs everyday, functional objects that exist within domesticated spaces. The man-made structures appear to project out of their environments, reflecting light from one of their flat surfaces. This simple device of highlighting a flat plane serves to encourage viewers to examine each object's sculptural qualities, and to reconsider their spatial relationship to the surrounding environment: patterns and connections begin to emerge, and the synthetic shapes invent their own architectural language in dialogue with their organic surroundings.
The series Ethereal Land focuses upon everyday aesthetic experience - here Guy documents unremarkable vistas that one encounters day to day. However, the photographs appear as uncanny resemblances of the real world, each with its own ethereal, almost celestial atmosphere. Guy strives to question one's assumptions of the apparently banal by showing the ordinary as both beautiful and mysterious.
