Framed Expanse – Luci Eldridge & Meg Rahaim

Phoenix commissioned artists Luci Eldridge and Meg Rahaim to make new work exploring the relationship between digital and print for this exhibition, which took place as part of Leicester Print Workshop’s Small Print International.

Whether rural or urban, peopled or desolate, landscape is encountered on-screen through the cybernetic eyes of drones, web-cameras and robotic explorers. Such imaging devices enable us to take part in a form of virtual travel, allowing us to witness the unknown or traverse the familiar through an unfamiliar eye.

Distances shrink with progress and the development of technology invites us to look in ever more detail at distant reaches of the universe. Yet these views of landscape remain partial and immaterial, manipulated and stratified, flattened and framed by technologies we do not fully comprehend.

An ongoing fascination with how landscape is represented by digital technologies is what drives the individual practices of Luci Eldridge and Meg Rahaim. Be it a pixelated flourish of cloud algorithmically rendered in the sky above Google Street View or the distant landscape of the planet Mars imaged by NASA’s rovers, landscape as a 360-degree physical experience is reconstructed via these imaging devices, withdrawn into a flat two-dimensional image.

Using printmaking as a practical and conceptual methodology, the digital is overturned in favour of the handmade as a means to reposition oneself within landscapes that are often distant and remote. Through analogue photography, etching, collage, and handmade textile techniques both artists offer contemplations on innately familiar landscapes, that would otherwise remain trapped within the digital space of the screen.