Darren Glass
Sense of play
It’s a familiar sight in any suburban park—a young man throws a Frisbee, runs after it and stoops to retrieve it from the ground. But then the sequence changes when our young man, artist Darren Glass, picks up the Frisbee and tucks it inside a black plastic bag. If you observed him in Woodhill Forest, say, you might see him walking through the trees with an innocuous looking pine log under his arm. But look closer and you’ll notice tiny holes piercing the bark and spiralling around the circumference of the log, which is actually a camera.
Walking around with these unusual cameras prompts a lot of attention and questions from passers-by, something that Glass would rather avoid. ‘I wanted to be able to photograph in an unusual way but not feel self-conscious about it. The log camera has a twisted film inside it, so the pinholes look down and spiral around the log. It’s a joke on what a log might see,’ he says.
His most ambitious camera to date is the lemniscate (infinity symbol) camera, which has multiple apertures and loops back on itself, photographing its own body as well as the landscape in a weirdly self-reflexive gesture.
Though Glass considers himself as a landscape photographer, when you look at the eerie, beautiful images taken with his ingenious pinhole cameras, you won’t recognise any elements of landscape—at least not as you know it. This is fine with Glass, who is committed to pursuing unexpected views of the world and building pinhole cameras that push the subjectivity of photography to its limits.
Virginia Were
This text is an edited excerpt from Virginia Were, ‘Sense of Play’, Art News, Spring 2006, pp.46-47. Reproduced with kind permission of Virginia Were and Art News magazine.
Darren Glass artist bio:
Born Auckland, 1969
Lives and works in Auckland
Master of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland
Image credits:
Darren Glass
Coastline Cam on location, Maori Bay (2006)
cardboard, brass shutters, aluminium
Courtesy of Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland
Log Cam on location, Muriwai Forest (2006)
cardboard tube, bottlebrush bark, brass shutters, aluminium, cardboard
Courtesy of Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland
Lemniscate on location, Cornwell Park (2006)
laminated cardboard, wood veneer, washers, aluminium
Courtesy of Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland
Installation view of Darren Glass' works in 'Telecom Prospect 2007', City Gallery Wellington, 2007.