Antony Cairns to exhibit at Daikanyama Photo Fair

Featuring a diverse collection of the artist’s recent works in a bipartite display, the booth explores the evolution of Cairns’ contemporary practice and with a particular interest in the possibilities of photographic printing.

Cairns has dedicated his artistic career to exploring innovative ways of printing his abstract images of cities at night.
Taken in some of the world’s busiest metropolises, his photographs uncover a new reading of these urban places away from the crowds and surroundings.

Cairns used these nocturnal photographs to make aluminium prints, incorporating the spills and oddities of the complex developing process to create distinctive monochromatic imagery.
These works feature selected photographs from the artist’s oeuvre, which have been permanently impressed within detached e-book screens due to the bistability of E Ink’s technology.
Displayed alongside his aluminium prints, Cairns’ E.I. series offers new ways of experiencing his ongoing archive.

While the first part of the booth focuses on Cairns’ black and white photography, the ensuing part gathers series that emphasise his shifting interest in adding colour into his works.

Taken during his visit to the large port city of Osaka, Japan in 2015, Cairn has employed images from his OSC – Osaka Station City series to create photographic montages printed on tinted IBM computer punch cards.
Utilising recycled materials from the early digital age, he adopted this method of art making to realise his photographs on a larger scale, at once highlighting the ephemerality of new technologies through his use of an outdated yet once prevalent recording medium.
Together with his montages, the exhibit also features Cairns’ OSC Collotype Portfolio, a collection of ten collotypes prints created during his residency at the Benrido Collotype Atelier last year.
Printed on Japanese Gampi paper, the works possess a certain tangibility, enhanced by the intricate tonal graduations and depth of each print.

The presentation of the portfolio includes one of the original, coloured glass plates, which the artist used to make his collotypes.
In addition to the display of his recent series, Antony Cairns will be taking part in a performance at Roman Road’s booth. The artist will assemble a new OSC – Osaka Station City photographic montage to show the evolution of these unique works.
Following the fair, Cairns will be participating in the group exhibition A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age at George Eastman Museum, New York from 22 October 2016.