Antony Cairns with a new series of works CTY
Antony Cairns (b. London, 1980) takes photographs 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.
Cairns presents his work in a number of complementary but contrasting ways: from painstakingly layered and assembled artists books LDN (2010), LPT (2012), OSC (2016) to translucent films of silver gelatin applied directly to sheets of aluminium, LDN2 (2013), LDN3 (2014) to experiments with electronic ink, both in working electronic Ink readers, hacked to contain his complete work, LDN EI, (2015) and on their extracted frozen screens; strange distant descendants of the daguerreotype TYO2 (2017). Cairns was also the winner of the 2015 Hariban Prize, resulting in a residency at the Benrido Collotype atelier in Kyoto. Once again faced with the possibility of extending and expanding the photographic image through its reproducible character Cairns made a series of interventions within, and interpretations of, the collotype process LA-LV, (2016). Cairns has recently begun to explore the prehistory of the digital age in several related ways, by printing his works and assembling them as montages on early computer punch cards OSC Osaka Station City, (2016) and by using the screens of outmoded digital cameras and equipment to screen and project his work. Cairns has exhibited and published widely, in Europe, the United States and Japan. He lives and works in London.
