Since 2018, Alan Phelan has explored the Joly screen process, an early colour photography method invented in 1894 by the Irish physicist John Joly. The first practical and stable additive process for producing colour images from a single photographic plate, it used black-and-white film in conjunction with a screen filter made of thin red, green and blue (RGB) lines, laying the groundwork for later technologies like the Lumière brothers’ Autochrome.
The artist’s unique Joly screen photographs draw on a fusion of art-historical and cultural references, cultivating a visual history for the Joly process where none existed. Fictional, doctored or queered, these “counterfactual” histories span five centuries of image-making, from Dutch flower painting to the performance of queer identities and subcultures in photography. Lit from behind by LED panels, sometimes in presentation devices made from antique furnishings, Phelan’s Joly photographs embody an illuminated intensity, small scale and objecthood.
Phelan has extended the Joly process into public art projects and architectural interventions – including new RGB and text-based works discreetly placed in the Exhibition venues. In the gaps and slippages that he explores between text and image, meaning is neither anachronistic nor fully contemporary, but rather transitory, contested and subject to erasure.
—Joanne Laws
