GATESHEAD.- Blackout, presented at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art through February 20, brings together a remarkable new sequence of images taken in Iceland by British photographer Dan Holdsworth.

Occupying a space between documentary and the make-believe, these photographs, reproduced to a grand scale, transform the elemental terrain of giant Icelandic glaciers as they melt away into a strange, futuristic landscape.

Blackout’s awe-striking photographs appear so otherworldly it is almost impossible to believe that these lunar-style landscapes actually exist. The blue of the sky becomes the deep black of space, while the earth appears in negative, beyond imaginable human time and scale. Reconstructing the notion of the romantic sublime for the 21st century, Holdsworth’s practice is consumed with investigating the unknown: pushing the peripheries of time, space, and consciousness beyond the limits of ordinary perception.

Since the late 1990s, Holdsworth has developed a reputation as one of the most innovative British photographers currently working with landscape. While his early series concentrate on the quiet moments in everyday spaces – office buildings after work, car parks at night and deserted motorway flyovers – his most recent work, as captured in Blackout, explores the natural world, providing a humbling reminder of the scope of things yet undiscovered.

Dan Holdsworth, born 1974 in Welwyn Garden City, England studied photography at London College of Printing from 1996-1998. He has shown solo exhibitions at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh ; National Maritime Museum , London ; the Store Gallery, London ; Barbican Art Gallery , London and mima, Middlesbrough . His groups exhibitions include CRASH, Homage to JG Ballard, Gagosian Gallery, London; Bienal de Lanzarote (Islas Canarias) organizada por el MIAC-Museo Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de Lanzarote, Spain; All Tomorrow’s Pictures The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London; How We Are: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain, London and Modern-Life Painter’s Photography Collection, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

He was short listed for Beck’s Future Prize, ICA in 2001 and short listed for the Northern Art Prize, Leeds Art Gallery in 2007 and in 2008 received the Visiting Fellowship from The European Centre for Photographic Research, University of Wales