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Cast

2008

Dryden Goodwin

Cast will be a major exhibition of new work by the British artist Dryden Goodwin. It is co-commissioned by The Photographers' Gallery and Photoworks and is the last solo exhibition at the Gallery's current location. It will be the first time that Goodwin has developed a significant body of photographic based works, and will comprise of a series made in and around the Gallery's new home at Ramillies Street, near Oxford and Regent Street.

Goodwin is drawn to using titles that hold many possible meanings, resonances and often contradictions. Cast is no exception and its multiple themes, such as to throw, to encase an object, to create a spell, to generate uncertainty - reflect the ambiguity inherent in his work. Featuring strangers caught at times of private moments or quiet reflection, within very public spaces, these new works explore a rich dialogue between drawing and photography. Goodwin extends his practice of drawing or scratching into the surface of the image, an action
that is at once intimate and invasive. It is a physical intervention into the stalled nature of photographic time that the artist characterises as a way of 'thinking into the photograph'.

Each of these new series feature portraits of strangers encountered while travelling across the city on trains, buses and on foot. In Cradle Goodwin photographs passers-by on the street at night and, once printed, carefully scratches over their faces with an etching needle to creating web-like markings. For Caul a digital stylus and drawing tablet is used to project membranes of bright red lines into the personal space of passengers on the top decks of night buses. Rock, a moving image work, echoes Caul, and re-animates sequences of photographs, depicting the subjects in constant stasis. In Casting panoramic shots of nocturnal street scenes are combined with multiple drawings of one or more people Goodwin studies. In Shapeshifter, a series of nearly 700 small sketches of fellow travellers on trains are displayed both individually and as a moving image work that merges all of the portraits into one constantly changing figure.
Cast is showing at the Photographers' Gallery, 8 Newport Street until 16 November 2008.