The Polarity Of Matter And Spirit No.2

The Polarity of Matter and Spirit No.2
Hughes and Conneally
New Parks, Leicester
November 2014

"No dead shark or calf ... a person waiting perhaps for the number 14 ... only willing to be photographed when shown how the surface of the shelter would actually make her hard to recognise"

The Polarity Of Matter And Spirit is a series of portraits taken in The New Parks Involuntary Painting Bus Shelter Photo Booth. It comes out of work through the ongoing Involuntary Painting Movement initiated by artists, Millree Hughes (New York, US) and Paul Conneally (Loughborough, UK).

'Involuntary Painting' is a term coined by Hughes in 2014 to identify and explore what an alien that landed on Earth, programmed with all the knowledge of art but never having seen any, might possibly mistake for a painting. This notion is used by Hughes and Conneally, along with a growing group of artists, to explore the nature, history and future of painting, space, place, time and more widely, art in in the twenty first century.

The Polarity Of Matter And Spirit portraits are photographed by Conneally through the scratched and marked perspex side of a bus shelter on Charnor Road, New Parks, Leicester. It is this surface that is the involuntary painting, not the portrait photograph itself. The subject is photographed through the involuntary painting which acts as a lens come filter in in the physical space between the digital camera, in this case an iPhone, and the subject in the bus shelter.

The Polarity Of Matter And Spirit identifies the bus shelter on Charnor Road, New Parks, Leicester, UK, the bus shelter towards the New Parks Social Club end of the road and on the same side of the road as Forest Lodge Primary School, as the first Involuntary Painting Photo Booth. Hughes and Conneally are in the process of identifying, with others, similar Involuntary Painting Booths around the world.

A further series of portraits taken in the New Parks Involuntary Painting Bus Shelter Painting Booth will be undertaken in 2015 by Hughes and Conneally as part of Involuntary Painting 1 New Parks : New York with and for Soft Touch Arts, New Parks Library and members of the New Parks community.