Transfusing Abstraction: Darren Harvey-Regan's Metalepsis

Darren Harvey-Regan’s photographic suite Metalepsis (2013) juxtaposes formalistic images, often on the verge of abstraction, with images of religious figures. What does this juxtaposition do within the series and within the broader context of contemporary photography? The answer requires a longer look at the shifting relationships between concepts of abstraction and transcendence over the past century. Broadly speaking, abstraction, once closely allied with concepts of transcendence, came to be linked instead to repression by the 1960s. In light of this conceptual shift, Harvey-Regan’s juxtapositions transfuse abstraction with a dose of its “prior” transcendent content. They also stage a series of questions around the relationship between two forms of faith in imagery: faith as a disposition to be represented, or performed, by images; and faith in the relationship between images and their ostensible referents.