2005

VERSION 3

Colours of the Desert

There is a common assumption, reflected in the works in this exhibition, that our post-industrial landscape is somewhat bleak. Pete Johnson photographs the relentless transformation of the Queensland countryside into a suburban wasteland by the Smart State’s constant expansion. Alan Hill’s photographs evoke the bewildering displacement of human life caused by this frantic progress. Angela Bailey documents much more minutely the evidence of people’s ordinary day-to-day existence in a society designed to function better without them.

Earlier generations of photographers might have expressed all of this in grim, colourless images of desolation. The 1930s Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange are perhaps the most famous pictures of human lives left behind by social change; Bill Brandt’s stark, strange, images of urban alienation from the 1940s emphasised that the subject could generate art, not just photojournalism; Dennis Stock’s 1955 photo of James Dean striding forlornly through Times Square made a pop icon out of loneliness in the land of advertised prosperity. In Australia, David Moore made severely monochrome pictures of the dispossessed from the 1940s to the 1960s, even converting coloured pictures to black and white to make them more sombre.

Angela Bailey, Alan Hill and Pete Johnson, however, have not presented a colourless exhibition. Many of the images are ruthlessly bright and far from grim. Many of them (those by Hill and Johnson) are engagingly humorous. To the long tradition of non-Indigenous artists depicting the natural Australian landscape as uncompromisingly indifferent to humans, these artists are adding their views of the way people have become superfluous to the manufactured landscape.

The only people in Pete Johnson’s pictures are photographs within the photograph: advertising billboards and family portraits. The sense of people having been edited out is heightened by the cropped bits of text that demonstrate how much of everything else has been edited out too. These snatches of words and phrases (which invariably add ironic meaning) often create the look of rapid-fire image-making in which the slow, lumbering figures of humans would get in the way. Of course the photographs are in fact meticulously composed, as the eerily empty image of a lurid orange building illustrates with particular harshness. It is a scene of such sterile perfection that it appears unlikely to be capable of supporting human life.

Alan Hill’s use of human figures is not quite so restricted, but his use of photographed text makes more pointed reference to the unsympathetic character of their environment. The rather lost-looking, cropped figure wandering past a Life Savers sign, and the pair of urinals beneath a Westfield advertisement that promises ‘We’re here to help’, provide a wry commentary on the absurdity of seeking comfort from the modern corporate world. The fashionable people on billboards in his nighttime study of Fortitude Valley are surrounded by unpopulated darkness, and ironically topped by a slogan that reads ‘Search for the sign’. (This is particularly ironic given that the building below is the old Institute of Modern Art, which for most of the 1990s was Queensland’s centre of semiology.)

Angela Bailey takes a closer, gentler view of the traces left behind by the people who have disappeared from her pictures. She photographs the abandoned personal effects and other signs of habitation remaining in housing estate flats deserted prior to their demolition. In the cheap floral brocade covering mattresses abandoned in back alleys, she observes the stains left by the people who slept on them. The mattress photographs have the layered complexity of a landscape, despite the fact they depict only a few square centimetres of textile. Beneath the fake woven flowers, the wavy stitched lines and the chemical colours, lies actual sweat. These are close-ups of a colourful artificial desert that has greater personal meaning for most of the artists living in the cities around the edge of Australia than the real desert in the centre.

Timothy Morrell