Welcome to the NEIL MASSEY archive, 30 years of documentary photography in music, youth-subcultures and travel.
Neil's work has been exhibited in the BARBICAN, SOMERSET HOUSE (Photo London), The HERBERT Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry (Museum of youth Culture) and is now in the permanent collection at the NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY.
Here you will find 'rare / collectible' c-type prints from late 90's - mid 00's, limited edition prints, posters, zines and books to buy in our online shop.
Global shipping with print partners in the UK, USA and Germany
Custom print sizes, framing and stamped and signed options available on request.
This collection is inspired by closed eye hallucination, kaleidoscopes, feedback loops and chaos theory. Made in the 2nd UK lockdown in the Winter of 2020. These artworks provided me with a very personal kaleidoscopic escape, a technicolour adventure into the unknown. A 30 year body of work in the making. The original ‘fluro acrylic paintings’ and ‘fluro body painted self portriats’ were created in the height of my raving days in 1991. In 2020 whilst trawling through my archive I found these negatives, they were then scanned and digitally reworked: KALEID{E}SCAPES: ‘RAVE ON’ were re-born...
**FEEDBACK LOOPS: Order and chaos can emerge on their own, from a simple system with feedback. A feedback loop is a picture in a picture in a picture, small changes become rapidly amplified as they loop around. Even though you can describe each stagein the process mathematically. There’s no way of predicting how tiny changes will end up in the final image.
**CHAOS THEORY: The study of apparently random or unpredictable behaviour in systems governed by deterministic laws.
**CLOSED EYE HALLUCINATIONS: Under psychedelics, when your eyes are closed the brain may function ‘as if’ there is a visual input when there is none - creating kaleidoscopic patterns.
Acrylic Fluro (Neon) Painting, 1991 - Digitally Reworked in 2020 - 60" x 40" Framed Artwork
"On the street's of Vietnam the Monobloc table and chair are an integral part of the landscape. Each morning the street vendors lay them out in new formations. They serve the Vietnamese workers, friends and lovers.
I photographed the Monobloc's as I found them. They reminded me of working, functioning, transitory installations. I was interested in the absence of people, that brief moment between the furniture being used. In this moment the different pieces of furniture seem to take on their own character".
Monobloc is part of The Vietnam Collection (2009-2015)
Text by Neil Massey
[TRACE] explores transformation and permanence in the urban micro-landscapes of 21st-century London. Fragments of human artefacts register as litter but speak to wider themes of consumerism and the inscription of human desires onto the environment. Discarded and disused, these found objects are the waste products of food, drugs, drink, furniture, industrial waste, sex and sport. At the end of their intended lives, they nevertheless persist as street-level agents of human activity. Their physical micro transformations of dismemberment, melting and decay are not isolated taphonomic processes but are constitutive of environmental pollution and the reconfiguring of the biosphere. Often hidden from mind, if not sight, [Trace] re-contextualises the detritus of modern urban life as vibrant, fascinating objects embedded in the circuits of global capital and exchange. [Trace] forces us to consider our role as environmental and geological actors in the age of the Anthropocene.
Text by Dr. Tim Stevens
On the streets of London, 'The British Telephone Box' stands battered and beaten; a disused relic from our recent history, still used by a small minority but mainly forgotten. Photographed on the technology that replaced them (my google pixel phone) 'An Ode to: The British Telephone Box' documents the last ones standing. This is my visual poem.
