These works partially reference a childhood memory from 1986, of viewing Halley’s Comet, a short-period comet visible from the earth every 76 years. My memory is not one of being overwhelmed by the infinite universe, but rather of a physical, optical phenomenon experienced that night. By looking slightly away, and not directly at it, the comet and its tail were more visible, brighter. Wikipedia tells me that this is indeed a night-vision perceptual phenomenon known as ‘averted vision’.

This memory and the sense of an indirect gaze amplifying vision resonate within my recent works. Generated from an archive of images taken, found or collected over the past 20 years, the collages are a way of collapsing time and space, of shifting boundaries and hierarchies, and introducing chance
encounters, even chaos. It’s a slight skewing of perception, in order to see something anew.

At the core there’s always a question: how do we map or construct meaning, or poetry, such as from the infinite mass of imagery at our disposal? A mass that, in itself, is nothing in an infinite universe.

Luke Parker – March 2016