Floating Point - Debut Solo Exhibition

Catalogue Essay by Scot Cotterell 2019

Athanasius Kircher the German Jesuit scholar and polymath introduced the term tabula scalata or ladder pictures in 1646 after painter Jean François Niceron described the technique in his 1638 ground-breaking book La Perspective Curieuse. The technique, an early version of what we now call lenticular images, forms a suite of visual and scenographic effects along a continuing lineage from the ancient triangular periaktos theatre coulisse (used to rapidly change theatrical scenography and create depth illusions), to the tazo (a collectable lenticular minicard included in Australian chip packets circa late 90s). The stuttered, binary animation of the lenticular image and its attendant notions of part trick, part cheap novelty presuppose our now ubiquitous down up scrolling, gif heavy, video saturated social moment. 

I have written on Jamin before. His work and he have both changed.

I know him as a friend. We are on divergent but oscillating paths – fellow travellers of some sort. He resonates and occupies space in diverse and divergent ways. He uses various types of disruptive pattern to dissect, constitute and redistribute images. Jamin has traversed several strata of imagery, all part of the mass mediated flow. I have watched the work flow through dense stark political portraits that betray a corrupt underbelly, to hyper glitz collage mashes of reference-heavy pop decay, to a studied excavation of the optical. A logical evolution of his work is to focus in, isolate and derive information from, this act of looking (visual flux) – you in relation to a thing, perceived by organs; the thresholds of these interactions.

Within the production of effects Jamin explores, image has gone now. At least in these works, the meaning carrier is removed. Now we witness the optic barrier with no penny drop of the visual reference – no untangling of the intertwined visual samples. Things are unanchored, set adrift from the time/place referent implicit in all image sampling. These works are composed in software and then executed by machine and hand – a code. They morph from object to image to decor to concept. They may be portals. They may also protrude into your space.

There is the sensation of travelling and moving data around.

A child sits in the passenger seat of a moving vehicle, alternately testing the wind with a right angled elbow and cupped hand and defocusing his eyes to create a peripheral parallaxing.

Repetition and difference. Animation and fracture. Seeing things.

These works resonate as your retina moves across them. Your gaze; their gaze. A silent geometry acting against you and in concert with your ability to see, to perceive pattern, to compose images, and to infer or impose meaning – ground control receiving transmission optics, locked mid glance, and mid movement. There is a toleration of ambiguity, not by any means a resignation but a denial of the image, instead choosing to focus in on the perceptual moment.  These works capture the novel, the epiphanic and elongate it. Jamin exerts and authors control over this visual effect, testing variations on us, with us.

Floating in deep space, cut off from oxygen.

Erasure of identity. Cellular regeneration. Breath.