click HERE for link to the film, Instamatic (The password is ADDICTED TO ECT – all uppercase.)
Bobinska Brownlee Gallery
Presents:
Year Book by Richard Ducker
Press Release:
"When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning". Jean Baudrillard, 1998.
While it has long been recognised that memories are unreliable and nostalgia is a sentiment loaded with fiction, what is changing is our relationship to the present in this ‘post truth’ era, and that affects the veracity of both the past and the personal. The substitution of shared facts with ‘alternate facts’ affects a self that is now subsumed into an algorithmic maelstrom where all previous anchors of certainty have been removed. It is to this uncertainty that nostalgia now applies itself. The constituent parts of this exhibition look to engender a dialogue between nostalgia and the algorithm through the personal and our new post-fact world.
The short film Instamatic, 2024, directly considers the emotional pull of nostalgia through the illusion of memory. The film presents as a slide show of family photographs with a narration recalling memories that appear both highly personal and private. However, all of the photographs were found and of unknown origin, while the memories were fabricated in collaboration with ChatGPT using prompts in response to the images. This conceit undermines the authenticity of the authorial voice and confronts us with the conundrum of what to trust in our own past and the stories that we tell.
Unstable Relations, 2012, belong to a series of double self-portrait paintings, based on a single black and white photograph of the artist aged 7 years old. There is nothing remarkable about the original photograph except that the boy (the artist) is wearing a shirt and tie and has a particularly unsympathetic haircut - yet these two features seem to take the image out of the specific and into the general: it could have been any young boy from anytime between the 1930s and the 1970s. There is an elasticity of reading the paintings between the specific memory of the moment (for the artist) and an historicism that is as much to do with fiction, history lessons, tv documentaries, and the archival. Nostalgia and history seemed to pour out of, and into, this image. To further occupy the territory between the photographic and the painted image, the paintings are given a red glaze, which while adding to their paranoiac presence, also suggests the image being realised under the developer’s light. Both the photographic and the paranoiac are then emphasised further as a consequence of their doppelganger repetition. Through these visual devices the movement of memory and fiction renders the image both unstable and imprecise. The paintings are then presented over a large vinyl blown up film still image taken from ‘Instamatic’ generating an arrested bricolage and a shift in scale, a moment of spectacle without coalescence.
Lastly, the moment of this paradigm shift to our ‘post truth’ world of ‘alternative facts’ seemed to have happened with the aftermath of the Sandy Hook tragedy. On December 14, 2012, a mass shooting occurred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, United States. The perpetrator, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, shot and killed twenty-six people. Twenty of the victims were children between six and seven years old. In the weeks that followed, a number of fringe figures promoted conspiracy theories that disputed what occurred. The one that gained the most traction, as popularized by Alex Jones on his InfoWars podcast, denied that the massacre actually occurred at all, asserting that it was faked. It claimed the event was a classified training exercise involving members of federal and local law enforcement, the news media, and ‘crisis actors’, which they claimed was modelled on Operation Closed Campus, an Iowa school-shooting drill that was cancelled in 2011 amid public outcry. Jones described the shooting incident as "synthetic, completely fake with actors". In ‘Year Book’, 2024, these ink drawings address this loss of trust in what we know. Each child is drawn from a Google image search, yet trying to fix them in ink seems analogous to holding onto both a fading memory and an idea of what might constitute a fact. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci: out of this nostalgia we have for a world that has died, Sandy Hook was perhaps the moment that gave birth to the monsters of the present, while a new world struggles to be born.
Richard Ducker, 2026
Private View: Wednesday 6th May, 6-8pm.
Gallery opening times: Thursday – Saturday, 2-6pm, or by appointment.
Artist in conversation: The artist will be in conversation about the exhibition on 30th May.
Exhibition runs: 7th May to 6th June.
Bobinska Brownlee Gallery
38 Tower Court, Canonbury St, London, N1 2US
For more information contact us on 00 44 (0)786 606 3663
Review by Paul Carey-Kent, ‘Year Book’ at Bobinska Brownlee Gallery
Can we believe the past? After all it is fixed in a way we assume the future is not. Yet Richard Ducker’s cunningly confounding show at Bobinska Brownlee New River throws that into doubt. ‘Instamatic’ is a slide projection of early 1960s photographs, annotated by both captions and the artist’s own voice over. Ducker builds up a nice balance between nostalgia and cynicism in recounting his childhood memories… or not. The photos are all found images of unknown people, and most of the words come from feeding descriptions of the images into Chat GPT.
So I was ready for the vague – because rapid ink on wet ground – rows of children’s faces making up ‘Year Book’ to be another pretence. In fact they show – as accurately as the technique allowed – the all-too-real children killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting of 2012. Except that, in an early post-truth moment, there were claims that the incident was faked and populated with ‘crisis actors’. Surely Ducker isn’t buying into that?
Having had the apparently real fake and the apparently fake real, I was sceptical of the double portraits said to be of Ducker aged seven, rendered in a red suggestive of a darkroom development in progress, back in the days when photographs were seen as depicting the world objectively. Perhaps he did look like that, but we’re asked to compare the image with a blown-up face which isn’t Ducker, unless he sneaked himself in earlier as a fake fake, as it comes from ‘Instamatic’. So who knows? No wonder it’s titled ‘Unstable Relations’.
Paul Carey-Kent, 2026.
