Bill Lane - 'Soiled'

Wednesday 29 August - Sunday 23 September 2018 

Bill Lane’s Soiled disrupts the obsessive aesthetics of commercial still life photography to construct ‘gross’ words from cheap mass-produced nature referents. Not all of us will find the words in Soiled gross. Those that do will find them to be literally unspeakable. The technical name for this is logomisia, though it is more commonly known as word aversion. It affects roughly one in five.

In Soiled, careful word/object selection aims to suppress any potential meaning. Advertising has conditioned us to expect a comforting connection between the parts of an image. When that connection is not evident, then the result is an absence. In ‘Soiled’, that absence is aligned with our ambivalent attitudes towards nature. Consequently, the emptiness implied by this absence of meaning becomes the actual meaning of the work: a meaninglessness born out of our disconnected relationship to nature.