LONDON.- Ames Yavuz presents Lighthouse, a solo exhibition by Donovan Wylie. The body of work on view comprises long-exposure photographs of distant lighthouses, visible only by their points of light within vast seascapes; representing both barriers and invitations, closeness and distance.

As in his earlier work, Wylie approaches Lighthouse through a process of “surrendering” to the subject. The neutralisation of authorial subjectivity continues Wylie’s long-standing “systematic approach” as an image-making practice, first seen in his work Maze (2004), in which the contingencies and contextual vagaries of his subject-matter dictate the form and format of the work.

The project began in the wake of the June 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. Since then, Wylie has photographed the light emitted from lighthouses from across the borders and coastlines of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and France. These photographs were made on specific dates marking events of political, legal or ecological significance. The result of the photographic process in Lighthouse is “an unknowable image” for Wylie, “carved only by the movement of the sea, and the contingencies of light and time”.

Donovan Wylie (b.1971, Northern Ireland) utilises a combination of conceptual and typological approaches to explore alternative strategies for the representation of conflict and acts, simultaneously as a complex mix of the historical, metaphorical, aesthetic, and philosophical.

Over the last twenty years, Wylie has created significant bodies of work that have focused on contemporary military architectures. His Architectures of Conflict explores how military and surveillance structures materialise the ideologies of control, and how they both shape and are shaped by the landscapes and histories they inhabit. Wylie first came to critical acclaim with Maze (Granta, 2004), a series of 80 photographs depicting the Maze prison, a site synonymous with the conflict that gripped Northern Ireland from the 1970s through the late 1990s. Maze was shortlisted for the 2010 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for the most significant contribution to the medium in Europe and has been widely exhibited in both photographic and architectural settings, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

In addition to photography, Wylie often works in film. He received a BAFTA in 2002 for his film, The Train.

Wylie lives in his native Belfast and is a Professor of Photography at Ulster University. His work is featured in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the National Gallery of Canada; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.