Johno Mellish | The Light that Found You | Paris Photo 2021

THK Gallery announces its first participation in Paris Photo with a Solo presentation by Johno Mellish, The Light that Found You.  

Paris Photo will be returning to the Grand Palais Ephémère from 11 - 14 November 2021. THK Gallery is one of 15 projects selected by curator Shoair Mavlian for Curiosa, the section of the fair dedicated to emerging art.  

Says Mellish, ‘My pictures of people form a continuous body of work and are a result of my thinking about  the relationship between the material and the emotional in the place that I find myself in.’ 

THK Gallery presents a selection of work from the past five years on booth SC3. Read the full press release with exhibiton text by Sean O'Toole here. 

“My pictures depict people in various states of betweenness or transition. It's this in-between state that is interesting to me. Between living and dying, disbelief and belief, my photographs depict people going about their lives seeking, yearning and sometimes finding. 

 

I have used light – never static and always changing – and the lightning strike as a way to think about this betweenness in my photographs. Lightning as a metaphor both for what I’m trying to do with my work and as a metaphor for the type of photography that I engage with. Like a lightning bolt, a camera's flash illuminates for a second and a camera records a fleeting moment in time. The metaphor extends into the subject matter of my work – fleeting, emotionally charged moments." 

"A photograph of a girl wearing a school dress, grass green, resting on a scorched field. The night before I had photographed lightning bolts striking across the same field. Two days later I read in a local newspaper that concerned residents blamed people for burning down the field. She looks away, towards the same horizon, her body suggesting indifference or resignation to the earth she rests on. 

 

For the fraction of a second the lightning strikes, the order of time is inverted, brightly: night looks like day. The image seized from the same world by the camera is of a split-seconds’ operation. Charged and static, telling and mute." 

"Consider stasis. Static has two meanings – it speak both of an imbalance of electricity on the surface of an object while also pointing to motionlessness. An idea is static until it generates action, yet meaning, after all, is not fixed, and is laid bare to interpretation, manipulation and coercion. To me, photography is the perfect medium to exploit the essential ambiguity of being in this world.

 

For the most part, I take pictures because I love working with people. People and images of people in transition, on their way, people going about their lives. I value the access the camera grants me to places and spaces that I wouldn't necessarily venture otherwise.  I am interested in the possibility with the camera to transform life into something worth looking at, or maybe even something with meaning.”

ZEITmagazin |A feature on Johno Mellish. Read the full article here.

Metal Magazine | Connecting the dots: interview with Johno Mellish. Read the full interview here.

AKAA 2019 | Le Journal Des Recontres: article on Johno Mellish written by Ashraf Jamal. Read the full piece here.

Art Times | April 2020 Edition: article by Ashraf Jamal highlighting the work of Johno Mellish. Read the full piece here.

Art Times | February 2020 Edition: article by Sven Christian focusing on the THK Gallery show Different Angles, featuring Johno Mellish. Read the full piece here.