Shadows and Projections

Exhibition at Glasgow Cass Artspace, April 2026; this text was provided as a gallery handout  

As an artist who has long been interested in how titles function, I chose the exhibition's title, ‘Shadows and Projections’, as a means to introduce some common concerns across the work that comprises it, without wishing to suggest that this is only what the work is about: it’s also an invitation as a way to think about the artworks shown. Some pictures use shadows as a central motif, and as a means of communicating something of what’s outside the frame, projected shadows as an index of some unseen object or contingency, the larger context of the world that the picture is cut from; communicating this, the larger context, a message from the image’s ‘zone of production’–absent or reduced in the necessary limitations of the singular art object itself–has been a ‘problem’ that the making of the work engages with, yet any solutions in the work remain always provisional or speculative. The shadows of unseen trees thrown onto a wall tell us something of the nature of a space outside the frame that we as the viewer can construct in our imagination, perhaps the slightest of clues from which to derive this imaginative space, but, importantly, it tells us something about the nature of framing, and so of the nature of pictures themselves. 

Shadows are made through projection of course, but there are also works with projected images, film projections or images projected through a lens, images projected onto the ground glass screen of the camera obscura; shadows and projections also function as analogies and metaphors, the shadow of art history on the contemporary, the persuasiveness of photographic or cinematic images casting a shadow over the hand-made artwork, the projection of the viewer into the space of the picture, or into its time, through calls to the imagination. Thematically, the work in the exhibition explores the limitations of the static image, the still technologies of painting, drawing, and photography, and their relationship to images that exist in the wider world–and how they construct worlds for us and how we understand them: moving images, with their added dimension of time and duration, the importance of mise-en-scène and location, layers, repetitions and doublings of the image, and the histories of images and spectatorship–all embodied in the prior experience of the viewer brought to the work. 

Some paintings use strategies of trompe l’oeil: the quodlibet form (or 'what you will') allows disparate elements to be brought together in a visual argument, while denying pictorial space–the picture is not something happening (or projected into a space) on the other side of an imaginary plane–it's here, in the same space as you. These paintings–Shadows and Projections I and II–also present fragments of historical research around self-quotations from earlier paintings on the theme of shadows (including a reference to Plato’s Cave through a seventeenth century engraving, the famous allegorical shadows given new resonance with the invention of cinema); another trompe l'oeil painting inscribes shadows onto its surface as a means of suggesting something of the nature of the picture's own space around the viewer (After Carel Fabritius), while a quotation from Twelfth Night in another work (The Picture of 'We Three') acknowledges the role of the viewer as an active participant in the 'completion' of any artwork. 

Another method of extending still images is through doubling and repetition. There are artworks in the exhibition that exist not as a single image, but as two or more panels, suggesting a relationship to be drawn. After Chris Petit and Überqueren eines Flusses both represent the parallax effect of a moving viewpoint. After Chris Petit is based on two successive frames from a video shot from a moving bus, showing a derelict building in Bristol, used as a location in Chris Petit’s film Radio On (1979), where two characters are seen from the outside, framed in separate windows in an external travelling shot. In the pairing, from an initial viewing, the slight difference between the two paintings forms a question, or forms the real subject of the work: the gap between the two frames (a missing duration), how the subtle shift in perspective denotes the relative position of the viewer: time (the gap between the two frames) becomes space (the gap between the two positions). Überqueren eines Flusses (‘crossing a river’ in German) takes a similar approach to After Chris Petit but without reference to a particular film–the paintings here are derived from two different frames of a 16mm film shot from a train crossing the Rhine in Cologne (I had been interested in Patrick Keiller’s writing about the connection between the technologies of the railway and cinema: from the train, the experience of the moving, changing, framed view and its separation from the viewer, more passive than any preceding modes of transport, created the conditions similar to the experience of cinema). 

Three individual paintings make up Reverse Angle. This takes the editing strategy of shot/counter shot from classic continuity cinema and complicates it with a third image, the three panels deriving from photographs taken in Gdańsk. In Volker Schlöndorff’s film of The Tin Drum (1979) largely set there, there is a very brief shot-reverse-or counter-shot sequence where a character sits on a step, then is seen silhouetted from behind looking up at an ornate tower; in reality, the first shot was taken on the steps in front of the tower itself, thus making a spatial impossibility of the second shot: the third panel in the artwork shows a different set of steps on the other side of the street from which one can actually see the tower. This shot/counter-shot/counter-counter-shot reflects on the nature of editing to the creation of a coherent world internal to the film in the imagination of the viewer through editing, the way individual shots are sutured together: the third panel becomes a conundrum in the gap it opens out with the title of the piece. 

The projected image and its repetition features in Projection, Location, Separation, Reproduction, a pair of paintings representing a reflection on Vermeer’s much speculated-on use of the camera obscura. A camera lens is used to project an image of a still life inspired by one of Vermeer’s paintings onto the back of a postcard of a different work by the artist, doubled by its front, the physics of the projection providing an inverted image, the painting doubled to invert the inversion. The beginnings of both paintings began as still life details, partially obscured by physical removal, and then the painting of a subsequent layer of the image of projection. 

The drawings from the series Bruges-la-Morte are developed through a layering technique, where each image was traced without reference to previous traces deposited on the paper. Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a symbolist work by Georges Rodenbach, is notable for being the first novel to be illustrated by photographs; the plot indirectly inspired Hitchcock’s Vertigo, after being filtered through another novel, D'entre les morts, by Boileau-Narcejac. In Bruges-la-Morte, (and the subsequent films based on or inspired by it), the theme of repetition and return, with echoes, foreshadowings, doublings and doppelgangers, structures–or haunts–the narrative. The paper of the drawing becomes a screen for projection, with successive images overlaying themselves, obscuring and making the previous images hard to read; the succession of tracings providing an analogy of how a film works through the accretion of successive scenes, impressions merging in the viewer’s experience, above and beyond the simple retention of images on the retina, the supposed ‘persistence of vision’ necessary for the enjoyment of the moving image. 

Aside from trompe l’oeil, the motif of pictures-within-pictures is another means of negotiating the limitations of the still image. Mural and Houses by a Canal use this motif, with both paintings complicating their temporality through these internal references. The mural in the title of the first painting refers to the image painted on the end of a building which shows a view of the Berlin Wall which would once have cut across the foreground space seen in the painting from left to right: the painting’s viewpoint is from a patch of open land that was once the ‘death strip’ surrounding the wall itself; the mural was painted to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall and German reunification. The name and dates inscribed internally to the painting provide clues about the specificity of this resonant picture-within-the-picture. Houses by a Canal shows a detail of Vermeer’s painting The Little Street (c.1657-58), reproduced as if the figure is life size, into a doorway in Delft which was identified as being the exact location of the alley seen in the painting, although there are other candidates for exactly where this was located. To a lesser extent, The Frustrated View, which shows a postcard of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, is also an image within an image, which is about a denial of pictorial depth through an obscuring landscape element, and uses an internal framing within the framing, being one of a series of paintings in which the painted white border is a subtle reminder of the act of framing as an act of cropping. 

The use of language extends the limitations of the image further. Words appear in a number of the pictures, Mural, FILM, in the trompe l’oeil works, but, as Victor Burgin has stated, images are always surrounded by language, as a broad discursive space; in practical terms, language appears to artworks as captions or simply as titles–the proper names by which we refer to works of art. The titles of The Hottest Day of the Year (which shows a photographic negative, exposed on that day–an assertion through language of something the image cannot contain–made a positive by being rephotographed as a paper negative) and A photograph exposed for the looped duration of a radio transmission (which also insists on the condition of the production of the image as something the photographic process is unable to show), function as extensions of the image. Gants Hill takes language further: the text describes what cannot be seen outside the four edges of the picture, as well as behind and in front of the viewer’s position, and then describes what is outside the frame in terms of the time in which the photograph was taken, the text an internally projected narration by the viewer for the still image. The use of language extends the limitations of the image: this text that you are reading is in the process of doing so, now–whether you are reading in the presence of the artwork–or perhaps you have left them behind, concentrating on this text in their absence, so that now the images exist as shadows in the memory. 

Nicholas Middleton 2026