2006

In Anticipating the Islands Deb Mansfield continues her exploration of the littoral areas between land and sea, the exotic and the domestic. Having grown up near Moreton Bay, its mangrove forests and muddy tidal flats have provided a wealth of inspirational material for an artist who is fascinated by the zones between nature and artifice. In earlier works Mansfield printed large photographs directly onto the gallery wall that referenced 19th century French scenic wallpapers with their panoramas of the newly explored Pacific Islands, including Australia. These images served both as décor and documents of an Arcadian “natural” world that existed outside the common knowledge of the times. As such, they were part fantasy and part fact.

In Mansfield’s new works she returns to the mangroves and mudflats, collecting botanical samples to be placed in her living room. From these she has produced indoor installations that are reminiscent not so much of the wallpapers but how they attempt to represent that strange area between what is known and what is imagined. Her torch lit photographs of altered environments thus suggest a kind of reconciliation between interior and exterior spaces or for Mansfield herself, two areas of familiarity, Moreton Bay and suburban Brisbane. The photographs have an ephemeral and ethereal quality that is neither here nor there and this, as it was for the people of 19th century France, is Mansfield’s dream-like reality.

A builder by trade, Shane Gaston acknowledges a thirty-year working life in demolition and construction. “ All construction”, he says, “follows the destruction and removal of whatever previously inhabited the site, whether that was an older building or natural bush land.” Gaston has developed an intimate knowledge of these transitional building sites that are generally perceived as dirty, and dangerous. In Transformed Objects he photographs the detritus of destruction and its culpable machinery, by focusing on ‘extended’ moments where the sites seem to suggest a circular process rather than a finite project. The remains of the former Junction Hardware Building in South Brisbane have provided Gaston with the raw material to detail the march of progress and the way this changes the nature of objects caught in its path.

With a mind to an archaeology of objects that are neither uncovered nor buried, Gaston uses the duotone process (sepia) to remove what he calls the distraction of colour and expose a rich mnemonic history. Each of his images captures the eerie stillness of a construction site after work hours where the violent acts of heavy machinery are evidenced by bulldozer tracks and twisted metal. Silent objects transformed by time and machine lie motionless in a never-ending cycle of destruction and construction as history is ever destined to repeat.

Photographic papers and their relation to the images they support are the matter of Emidio Puglielli in his series entitled MSR (Multiple Same Rips). While it seems facile to state that there is no photograph without paper nor video without screen, such comments are not up for debate. Puglielli questions the relation between emulsion (paper) and image (photograph) by asking whether there might be a more meaningful association than the simple theory of support. In photography about photography he says that his work explores. “ … this terrain by creating pieces where the images are self referencing and where the image is confused with the material.” In other words he attempts to close the gap between how we might perceive image and paper.

With this in mind Puglielli has experimented with a number of strategies that expose and highlight the materiality of the paper and its relation to the image. Tearing images of torn paper, for instance, then rejoins the fragments to produce a montage of rips that appear simultaneously real and illusionary. Without close scrutiny the viewer is unable to distinguish what is a photographed tear and what is an actual tear. In this way Puglielli is able to displace his audience from what he calls, “ ... privileged perspective-enforced viewing …”, by requiring a physical encounter with the work in order to understand it. Thus he produces photographic work that can be understood as pure object (paper) rather than symbol (photograph).

Popular kitchen floor coverings from the first half of the 20th century have long been a prominent medium in the art of Bruce Reynolds. Fragments of torn and decaying linoleum with its brightly coloured patterns of flowers and leaves occupy painterly canvases that evoke landscape and kitsch kitchen décor. In Floating Zeppelin or House and Garden Reynolds redeploys vintage floor coverings with other patterned interior linings as a way exploring the nature/culture dichotomy and how this is perceived in relation to the aerial view. Travelling above even familiar places has compelled him to reconsider the implications of previously disconnected and grounded observations of land and the cultural edifices it supports.

In a sense, this is an exhibition where Reynolds is able to spread his wings by printing digital images taken from land and air onto an expanded repertoire of media including masonite and pressed aluminium, as well as linoleum. ‘Straight’ photographs of natural and urban environments complement a body of work where the artist’s experiments in (sliding) scale are an opportunity for audiences to draw connections between disparate works while comparing and reassessing how natural and cultural environments interact. From the aerial perspective that provides an illusion of knowledge in relation to geological scale, Reynolds seems to condense the distances between house floor and valley floor, ceiling and sky.

David Broker

David Broker is a writer, curator, broadcaster and Deputy Director of the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.