2 November 2024 - 23 February 2025

A Perfect Sentence
Oliver Frank Chanarin
Wolverhampton Art Gallery

2 November 2024 - 23 February 2025.

Oliver Frank Chanarin’s new exhibition, A Perfect Sentence, interrogates the photographic image in the age of the algorithm. At the centre of this installation are two machines made by the artist in collaboration with Tom Cecil and Ruairi Glynn. They continuously hang and rehang framed photographs that are stored in stacks on the gallery floor. Appropriating the language of automation, the machines handle the images according to an inscrutable logic; identifying, sorting, displaying, juxtaposing and storing photographs for the duration of the exhibition.

Chanarin says:

There is an uncanny sense that the work is watching us just as much as we are watching it, and it’s not necessarily a good feeling at all. There‘s something about the way the photographs are handled indiscriminately by the machines - the intimately human analogue prints bristle against the brutally mechanistic display. It goes against the grain of the images, and there is a sense that we are entering a factory rather than a gallery. Inevitably we are left to reflect on the life of photographs; the myriad ways in which they circulate and accrue our attention or get ignored, and the hidden forces that shape these experiences.

The archive of images on display, only ever partially seen at any one time, was produced by Chanarin last year while travelling across the United Kingdom. Shaped by many spoken and unspoken exchanges with strangers, the artist became increasingly preoccupied with people’s conflicting desires and anxieties around being seen, and the fraught experience of making documentary photography in this new social paradigm.