Fast Friend Les Dawnson

Nicholas Allen

Coming across the refuse of yesterday's constructions, Duncan's work probes the coded languages of disregarded symbols. The attempt is to read the stains on a road, the paint on a wall or a blotted out slogan in terms of their new environments. The challenge to the former imposition of these bluntly practical, stolidly ephemeral objects comes through contact. This occurs in their moments of weakness as they lie on the sidelines of an aggressively self-reconstituting culture.

All of which suggests an unease with Duncan's own immediate situations. Paradoxically, these situations make the photographs act as a kind of temporal conduit to the inheritances and representations which mould the self. This helps to explain the translation of language and reality in the work. In one photograph, an entrance to a yard edged with wind-bulged black polythene bags hints at the imaginative hinterland of the photographer. It is a rare clue to the impulse which has edited the rest of the world from the photograph. Duncan concentrates here on the clogged mud and leaf heavy kerb of the world outside. Against these reference points, the familiar initials of the roads' department on a metal barrier become like a coded list of possibilities, the awareness of lives and imaginations more plural than a deserted alleyway could normally suggest.

In another photograph Duncan approaches what appears at first to be a blank wall. The stimulus attracting attention is a concrete ledge running horizontal along the photograph. From such innocuous foundation the eye lingers on the split dimensions of the image presented. On the top half, a dead word painted over as the season for its meaning has passed. The word is 'loyalty'. In defiance of the power of its associations, a brown door sits immediately below it, a gap in a wall stained variously with different shades of damp and paint. The dichotomy between possibility and exclusion seems simple enough until the eye catches the darker colours around the door and the discarded wheels at the edge of ends view. A sense of menace evolves and the weight of the word above is finally felt as it taints the possibility of moving forward into the unknown. The power of the photograph is in its connections, the complex admissions of communal influence captured in the redefinitions of its own neglected constituents.

From exhibition flyer.