Thursday, August 5, 2010

The Shrinking Horizons of Childhood MA Exhibition

Light Sensitive (MA Group exhibition)
http://www.lightsensitive-maps-2010.co.uk/lightsensitive/home.html

I will show four 40x30" prints from my project The Shrinking Horizons Of Childhood
at this event in Baker St London this September. Note This Project now has its own Blog:
http://theshrinkinghorizonsofchildhood.blogspot.com

The MA Text
Mike O’Toole
The Shrinking Horizons of Childhood

Mike O’Toole’s part fictional part autobiographic series explores the tensions and culture of fear surrounding childhood. The children seem to be wavering between being objects of voyeuristic observation and willingly acting out roles in some vague performance.   

The Shrinking Horizons of Childhood deploys the aesthetic of confinement, contrasting the supposedly safe indoor space and the vibrating light coming through the windows posing no apparent danger, but still inaccessible. Surrounded by intangible, derealized images of nature reflected on the windows, the children come across as over-protected, locked in from whatever “might happen” outside and at the same time posing a threat to the established mechanics of society just by being out and about.

The photographic image functions an imaginary documentary, less preoccupied with reality than with fiction, echoing the essentially representable, imaginary reality learned from books and the internet the children tend to take for granted in their forced spiritual disconnection, and the socially imposed collective narratives of childhood, too vividly imprinted in their parents’ minds.    

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