(from “The Moonlight Rooms”), 2006
© Joss McKinley
Take a look at The Moonlight Rooms – a series of photographs made in nocturnal zoo enclosures, by Joss McKinley.
Magdalene Keaney of The National Portrait Gallery, London writes about the images:
There has been a tendency in recent contemporary art for paintings to mimic the effect or quality photographs in surface, composition and approach to subject. McKinley’s work could be positioned as the part of an opposing tendency of photographers who are interested in embedding the appearance and conventions of aspects of traditions of European painting as far back as the Renaissance into their imagery. There is an emphasis on theatricality, suggestion and atmospheric chiaroscuro effect that we are more comfortable, or at least more accustomed to accepting in a work of imaginative fiction such as literature, film or a canvas by Caravaggio or Rembrandt than a still photograph produced in 2005… He has described his intention to ‘move (his pictures) away from the real towards something fantastical, dark and looming’ to create ‘the poetic visual to which their romantic name alludes’.
(from “The Moonlight Rooms”), 2006
© Joss McKinley
“I’m comfortable with the notion of death,” McKinley explains in the January 2007 issue of Dazed & Confused, “I’m intrigued by what happens when something dies.”
McKinley’s father is a taxidermist which, as Keaney also points out, may go some way in explaining the artist’s interest in animals and, well, mortality.
Take a look at this series and other work on McKinley’s website. Don’t miss 6 Rue De Vaux.
