Working with intentional blur and motion, Gideon attempted to photograph time itself through the dissolution of images \u2013 in this case, it\u2019s the commonly photographed flower, however it\u2019s become so distorted that it\u2019s almost transparent. \u201cThe work resists photography\u2019s traditional function of freezing and preserving, instead embracing the medium\u2019s capacity to register change, movement, ephemerality,\u201d says Gideon. The artist explains that modern cameras are engineered to sharpen everything \u2013 the tricky part is, memory doesn\u2019t work like that, and if one follows the Susan Sontag school of thought: photography is never neutral nor can photos be taken as a fact. So Gideon doesn\u2019t attempt to recall beauty or loss in perfect detail, he focuses on capturing moments in passing \u2013 untouchable, out of reach, already gone as we remember them.<\/p>\n
Gideon shoots with a Sony RX100 VII, a small point-and-shoot that fits into his pocket. Its long zoom flattens spatial depth, compressing foreground and background into a single plane, which is how the photographs feel more like paintings than film. \u201cI love the camera as a tool \u2013 I see it as my paintbrush. The point of these small light ones is that they disappear in my hand and I feel more able to let the intelligence of my hand communicate, like drawing with a pencil,\u201d says Gideon. The works are printed on museum-quality matte archival paper, removing the sheen from printed film photographs, and preventing the reproducibility of photos.<\/p>\n
Japanese death poems, also known as jisei, come from a Zen Buddhist tradition that at the moment of death, a person achieves a particular clarity worth sharing, leaving behind a spiritual legacy rather than a simple farewell. For Gideon, the title of the aforementioned death-poem says something that he himself keeps circling back to: \u201ca flower is most fully itself in the act of disappearing\u201d \u2013 like the head of a dandelion full of florets \u2013 whispery, see-through and ready to blow away at the instance of a breeze. \u201cTransience isn\u2019t a flaw. It\u2019s the identity. The title Because We Fall extends this to us \u2014 beautiful because it\u2019s fleeting,\u201d says Gideon. \u201cIt\u2019s not a doctrine or a theology \u2013 it\u2019s just the clearest thing I\u2019ve arrived at after leaving spiritual leadership: pay attention, because this is passing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Working with intentional blur and motion, Gideon attempted to photograph time itself through the dissolution of images \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-373228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}