Lot 18: DAN HOLDSWORTH

Megalith #2
Signed, dated, numbered 3/5 in ink on the reverse of the flush-mount. One from an edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs.

121.6 x 154 cm. (47 7/8 x 60 5/8 in).

Colour coupler print.

2002

Dan Holdsworth, The New Art Gallery, Walsall, 3 October - 16 November 2003 (another example exhibited);  Northern Art Prize, Leeds Art Gallery, 22 November 2007 - 10 February 2008 (another example exhibited)

Steidl Verlag, Dan Holdsworth: Photoworks Monograph, 2005, p. 99

Acquired directly from the artist

As is the case with Holdsworth’s Megalith series, this photograph places the viewer in ambiguous relation to its subject. The structure that dominates the picture is at once familiar and alien. It might be an airport control tower (in fact it is the back of an electric advertising hoarding at the side of a motorway…) but its function, as Holdsworth has photographed it, is unimportant. Animated and energised by light, the structure appears almost as a living thing. Straining at its earth bound state and forging a kind of energy-field communion with the heavens, the tower seems to be powering-up for some form of levitation.  His camera, through the necessary long exposure, has transformed this scene into an hallucination, a fantastical vision that skews the spirit of William Blake into the space age.
 
Megalith draws out the dramatic possibilities of the artificially lit roadside at night, transforming that light through time into dynamic matter, an electric vapour that carves out space and creates the animate tension that fires the images. In one sense, like so many of Holdsworth’s photographs, this is an euphoric picture, a dream of some heavenly technology come into being, one that reflects the boundless drive of the human imagination and becomes a beacon to our future.
 
And yet there is something unsettling here, too. The flaring central position of the structure gives the photograph its iconic strength, but also…hints of the other kinds of power and control not entirely celestial or benign in their historical formations.
 
David Chandler, Dan Holdsworth: Photoworks Monograph, Steidl, 2005