Pushing the Envelope: An exhibition of mailed and correspondance art is a group show of 2D artists that use or reference archaic technology. The mailed artworks are hung throughout the UK’s National Museum of Computing (TNMOC)’s galleries between, beside or over the machines themselves. Opened November 2nd 2024 until March 30th 2025.
Titles: CTY01 and CTY02, 2024, Inkjet on 78 multi coloured computer punchcards sewn together using black thread. 56cm x 216cm. Steel rod attached for hanging.
Artist Antony Cairns (b. London, 1980) takes photographs and video at night, using the available light cast by buildings in urban centers like London, Tokyo and Los Angeles. His work is resolutely non-topographic, in the conventional sense in which photography has been used to record spaces, structures and architectural styles.
There is more, however, to Cairns’ work than simply his distinctive approach to picturing the urban environment. His is a practice that accepts and embraces the photographic medium in its sophisticated entirety: from the effect use of light on analogue film, through a range of experimental darkroom processes, to an innovative and highly specialized understanding of the early digital support materials available to the photographic image in the twenty-first century.
Cairns has exhibited and published widely, in Europe, the United States and Japan. His work is held in the art collections including V&A Museum, London, MEP, Paris and George Eastman Museum, New York.
He lives and works in London.
www.antony-cairns.co.uk