Current Exhibitions

In this series of ten inkjet giclee prints the viewer faces a subject that is ostensibly the genre of landscape. The clues are all there – black and white images of passages of rock, water, foliage.

But these works are not presented in the traditional horizontal landscape format. Rather, they have been arranged as a series of human-scale doorways – much like individual elongations of the traditional portrait framework. It is not until the individual works are perceived as one long running installation that the viewer can reconsider them as, perhaps, details from a larger subject-matter related to the land. And so the works hover in their suggestiveness about what their subject might in fact be: portrait, landscape, or some other realm of contemplation and interpretation that might run between the two. The importance of the portrait dimensions of the work becomes further emphasised in the artist’s explanation of the precise dimensions of each of the panels; he describes how they are directly linked to his own physical proportions, his own height of 1.8 meters, and explains how this precise and particular physicality is, for him, an essential way through which to negotiate a medium into being a conduit between himself and the world he finds himself in.

The artist describes how that medium – digital photography – operates in a way that is “more dislocated” than photography produced with film. Film, he argues, offers the artist a tangible material that is literally and metaphorically a physical link between the environment and the artist, whereas with digital photography, the link is of a more theoretical nature. He goes on to describe how the ground zero of ‘1’s’ and ‘0’s’ that form the bedrock of the digital fail to offer that same tangible link of ‘being in the world’ that seems to be offered by the material evidence of film. It is for this reason, he explains, that he was moved to produce the works to a scale and proportion that are so closely linked to his own physical presence in the environment. He is well aware of the tenuous nature of this insistence on physicality, but insists on the transparency of the artist’s agency within the work itself. He says,

I find I have to establish a physical link in the final image; in the case of these works it's about by own physical proportions, and it’s all been shot from my own eye-level – my height. It’s a whimsical link, but it’s one of the only links you can determine as a means of establishing a physical link between myself and the environment.

In this sense it is possible to interpret the works as portals – or doorways – that the artist has constructed as a means through which to see more clearly into his own world. It is as if he is grappling with a state of non-fixedness in order to search for a more grounded means of negotiating his craft, his ideas, his thinking.

The subject matter of the work offers more clues: the portal framing of the works lead further in through pathways that wend and waver and sometimes disappear in a spill of light or leaves. Or that become lost in the hard intractability of rock.

These are images of bush paths. Places for solitary walkers, carved from wilderness to accommodate one person at a time. Places where the passages through that environment have less to do with ‘getting there’ than with being there; walkways where the meandering slowness of transit insists on the importance of stopping, changing pace, readjusting vision and physicality to each new turn or incline.

And these particular paths seem particularly defined by the reappearances of rock – sometimes large, impassive slabs of it, at other times tumblings thrown up by rivers, in other places as gravelly details. It is the kind of rock that lies so close to the surface of so much of Australian land, as evidence of an ancient geological substrate that lies much deeper and more secretly in other continents.

The artist explains how he was drawn to a certain ‘stability’ in the areas he has chosen as sites; how the overall tone of certain places along the paths he has trodden as a bushwalker seemed to suggest “an essence that was more stable.” He explains,

In Australia we accept that the stability of the earth is a consistent. This isn’t the case in most other countries, where seismic action is more prevalent. But here the rocks suggest a timeless impression. That ancient nature of our environment is what pulls me in.

However this fascination with timelessness is counterpointed by an insistence on movement. The artist is also interested in the idea of transition, and on the ability of the photographs to perform the role of portals that can transport the viewer to a different place – an environment where the possibilities of a more slow, gentle and quiet implied movement suggests the opposite of stasis.

This interest in movement and transition is evident in the artist’s earlier works, where images of the sea, or images shot in the early hours of the morning evoke a fascination with impermanence, fleetingness and change. And Thomas Joshua Cooper’s images of the roiling surface of the ocean have been an ongoing inspiration for Hoy. In these works, he explains, the movement of the ocean’s surface suggests a power that is “almost psychic”. This new series, where deep, velvety darknesses pull us deeper into the picture plane, beyond the frame of our everyday lives, our vision is pinned into focus on crisp details that seem to bear a weight beyond the merely inconsequential details of one man’s walk. A leaf is held suspended on the meniscus of a pond; passages of intractable rock are dissolved into the blinding clarity of dappled light; a pathway disappears and one is left between wondering whether to proceed into the darkness, or to retreat back through the portal into the more measured indexes of the everyday.

Pat Hoffie
Associate Professor, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

(all quotes from conversations with Greg Hoy, November 2009).