Neil Montier

posted by Marcroy August 16, 2013

Neil is a London based photographer who has previously been selected for the ‘Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed’ exhibition at the Photographers Gallery. Neil has continued to exhibit and focus on his personal work, while also taking on commissioned work. His work touches on the subject of dystopian and utopian fiction, architecture and the imagined landscape. Relocating and erasing the familiar, is the continuous process used in his work. His technical process, crosses tradition and digital photography techniques enabling his work to create disjointed realities.

The two connecting bodies of work titled ‘In Arcania’ and ‘The Belt’ follow the same pattern of relocating and shuffling architectural monoliths to new and unsettling environments. The first series ‘In Arcania’ references early modernist visions of urban planning such as ‘Le Corbusier’ and the fantasy worlds of ‘Hugh Ferris’ (the influence behind the design of Gotham City). By using early modernist sketches as direct reference ‘In Arcania’ subverts all intentions of the utopic vision of town planning.

The Belt series focuses on the living and dying structures we find ‘sleeping like giants’ in an around our cities.
The work was inspired by London’s 1960’s ‘Brutalist architecture’ now sitting amongst the regeneration of riverside London. The 1960 ‘Brutalist’ structures of Erno Goldfinger’s ‘Balforn Tower’, the Smithson’s ‘Robinhood Gardens’ and the Thamesmead Estate, used as the backdrop for as the Droog’s stomping ground in Stanley Kubrick A Clockwork, Orange are just a few that are taken out of the location and placed into a new setting that points back to the time of their making.

http://www.neilmontier.com