From the beginning, the work of photographer and film-maker Clare Langan has either sought to transport us to other worlds, or to make our familiar world into a very strange place indeed. Her first exhibition, Dog Days, in 1993, offered us blurred, distorted views of individuals winning and losing battles with natural forces: magically running on water or plunging down through its murky depths, floating through the air or teetering precariously at the edge of a precipice. The world was recognisably our own, but her fiercely energetic figures seemed driven to defy its earthly constraints.
Born in Dublin, Langan studied sculpture at the NCAD and then attended a film workshop at NYU, which perhaps explains why even her still images resemble film stills. They seem to freeze instants from action sequences, never more so than in her 1997 exhibition Track. With settings that shifted from Ireland to New York to Iceland, Track literally transported us to new, disorientating terrain, its strangeness enhanced by Langan's penchant for interposing specially made filters and attachments between the camera lens and what is in front of it.
These devices, and her own visual flair, result in dreamlike, hypnotic images. "I use filters to create a particular mood and feeling. I don't want to simply produce realistic images of the world, and as part of the process of altering what is there I began to make filters. In fact, they are painted with glass paint - the paint used to make stained glass - so each image that you see is painted to some extent. I don't play around with effects afterwards, in processing or whatever: the way it goes onto the negative is the way you see it on the screen."
The sequences of images in Track tracked a single, isolated figure through a variety of other-worldly environments. It had an air of displacement and melancholy in some ways reminiscent of the films of Andrey Tarkovsky but with, for one thing, quite a different colour sense. An intense, luminous blue dominated. Now, with Forty Below, currently showing at the Green on Red Gallery together with photographic prints, Langan has made a short film of her own. Partly shot in Iceland, it plunges us directly into a radically altered, post-apocalyptic world, again seen through the eyes of a shadowy, lone observer.
It is, she says, "a world that has a deserted, desolate feel. Looking at it, you're not sure what it is that has happened, or what might happen now. There's just a suggestion of a figure there every now and again." What, as she sees it, has happened? "Well, there are some indications that there has been the advent of an ice age - it actually starts with an image of ice, and then moves on to images of the urban and rural landscape submerged under water. So there are these various suggestions of cataclysm." There is a soundtrack by Paul Brennan. "It uses the sounds of the wind howling, of water rushing, of volcanoes. Again, it's all about creating a particular feeling, it helps to establish the mood." The abiding impression is of a tenuous human presence in a world of immense, indifferent natural forces.
Now that she's completed the film, she sees it in a sense as a series of still images, thus completing a circle. "I was always aware of the influence of film on the way I made images, in terms of the way they were framed and composed and the sense that they were fragments of narrative. Now you could say that I've approached film in a photographic way."
Clare Langan's exhibition, Forty Below, is at the Green on Red Gallery until May 22nd.
