The concepts of power and emptiness are deliberately juxtaposed in this exhibition and although one can immediately jump to the sixth form conclusion that both are two heads of the same coin there is, in Jason Oddy's photography, evidence of far subtler and far more intricate machinations.
Oddy's main concerns seem to be with artificial space - space that is not naturally occurring but is contrived - and space that exists within the edifices of power and authority that we, as a race, like to throw up. We like such buildings to be imposing, to deify those who work in them and to diminish those who are invited to visit them. It is curious to realise that it is the space that the building encapsulates as opposed to the shell of the building itself that achieves this. We create a space, an emptiness that implies... what? An indication of godhood? An authority that is unfathomably omniscient? The short answer is yes. Although none of these photographed spaces are natural they all try to emulate the great natural spaces of the world: mountains, canyons, chasms - those vast emptinesses of nature that dwindle the onlooker to the stature of an insect and give one a taste of the humility one would feel in the presence of God. These buildings try to imply that GodŐs handiwork runs rich and deep through their very fabric, through each brick and girder - God is in evidence in the very space and nothingness that rushes between the walls that box it in. But it is not God. It is us. Man. Our self-elevation to godhood, the mantle of godlike power that we take for ourselves. This alone is what is really represented by these frowning, austere spaces. Look upon our works and tremble.
And how does Oddy's work capture this sense of power that men set themselves over other men? By the absence of man. Nature abhors a vacuum. Nothingness cannot exist. These spaces that Oddy has photographed are full - each and every one of them: there are objects, the accoutrements of use and purpose, there is architecture and geometry, there is mathematics, there is colour and texture. There is no emptiness. But there are no people in Oddy's photographs and so we see the spaces as empty. We see them as coldly imposing and alien - yet they are the works of our hands and our minds. Should they not be familiar and homely? Just as when we stand upon the lip of an unpeopled canyon and, although it be teeming with life, we see it as empty so too do we elevate these architectural spaces to the state of emptiness. And it is an elevation. WE cannot abhor a vacuum - nature has little to do with it - and when faced with it (when faced with the absence of ourselves) we attempt to fill it... with God if we are of that mind, if not then with the atmosphere and ether of our own power and authority. The buildings that Oddy has photographed are evidence of this - proof of our love and repugnance of immense space, gargantuan emptiness. From Hitler's two mile long holiday complex on the Baltic Island of Rugen to the vast clinical enclosure of the Moldova Sanatorium (swimming pool or ice rink? You tell me) our obsessions with our own power and the creation of our own emptinesses are shamefully clear. Maybe it is not power and emptiness that are two heads of the same coin but power and folly?
Influencing Space is a perplexing and sobering exhibition - and all the more worthy because of it. There is a stillness to Oddy's photographs - not an emptiness - and though humour is very much in evidence it is both black and uneasy, the joke inevitably being very much on ourselves. 'The administration declines all responsibility'. Indeed.
copyright Steve Blake 2002