Exhibition: Andrew Stanney - 'In-Passing'

The London we know is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath its familiar surface lies another city, a Hades of buried and forgotten subterranean man made structures, passages, rivers and sewers. The human race has pierced the ground beneath the city for almost two thousand years; subterranean London evokes a nostalgia, fear and romance of adventure in the minds of many. It is an unmapped city, from which one might never escape.

Andrew Stanney’s photography documents parts of this fascinating world. Here are the remnants of communication, silent, their voices irreparably changed, occupying depopulated spaces. They are function mutated with age. Silent witnesses to the millions of that once past, they haunt their subterranean world, glaring patiently from the walls. As posters, they insist they should be taken as reality, but are too damaged to make a cohesive statement. From close up, it becomes clear that the referential reality of the photographs to paintings is a fiction, an effect of the ageing process that produced them, however the entire body of work records an orphanage of oddities, frozen forever in compositional decay, producing strange juxtapositions and unlikely meaning. Like the still life painters of the past Andrew Stanney’s photography calls attention to the significance of things, whose significance we have missed, a photographic post mortem.