As with many artists who wrestle visual perception, Shaun Waugh interrogates photography’s claims to reality. Aligning old and new technologies, New Games grapples with the medium’s technical and material characteristics to arrest disjunctures in our ways of seeing. Waugh offers meditations on the aesthetic pleasures had when perceiving forms and shapes: their colours and hue, their depth, their dimensions. It’s timely in the fourth industrial revolution, with image generators startling comprehension. Drawing on machine learning and artificial intelligence, a key to Waugh’s approach to photography is the slippage between image and object and the mental and perceptual games this throws up for the viewer. Never quite sure what kind of image we are seeing, New Games sets out to point to a conceptual volatility of shapes and colours; the non-verbal lessons that would help us recognise and understand the shape of our world. In this sense, Waugh’s current practice aligns with how photography contributes to our ontological uncertainty.

From an essay by Marcus Moore, Shaun Waugh: Subject Failure (Rim Books, forthcoming 2024)