CTY / Unknown Places

CYT / Unknown Places is a duo-show of English artists represented by Intervalle. Polly Tootal (1978) and Antony Cairns (1980) share a fascination with the megacities.
Polly Tootal unearths spatio-temporal rifts in bits of cities that seem to have acquired a hybrid identity. In the view camera, after a long and meticulous identification, she freezes these in-betweens, entirely shaped by man and yet devoid of any presence. These silent images rustle with tension because they always represent borders between two states. Polly Tootal: “The universal anonymity of these photos tells another story of modern Britain. It whispers the silences of sterilized life, the hypermodern, the supermodern, whatever you call it, the illusion that history has reached an end point, the lie that it is a peaceful place, that there are no more wars here, that there are no more noises to make, no more dramas. Banality, apathy, convenience."
Antony Cairns as Polly Tootal decontextualizes the city. Antony Cairns' images are inhabited by ghostly buildings. They seem to float in a smoky mist, as if they were unreal. The root is always night shots, in artificial light. He develops and retouches his photographic prints himself in the darkroom, before digitizing them and printing them on obsolete digital media.