2006

Presence, Absence, Ego and Id

In keeping with the QCP ethos, there is a diversity of photographic practices in this group of exhibitions. While disparate innature, the work of the artists involved all comment on humanity in their own distinctive manner.

Melbourne-based David van Royen presents two bodies of work. In the Middle captures meditative, contemplative, isolated individuals, apparently lost in their own thoughts amid domestic scenes. Colours dominate the images, in reflection of their implied emotional overtones. The photographs are clearly orchestrated, having very much a filmic quality (…), yet retain an aura of authenticity within the presented scenario. We don’t know the history or future of van Royen’s subjects, but we can empathise. We could also dismiss, but there is something more occurring in these images, something that reminds us of our own existence.

Mattresses reveals echoes of our own humanity. One’s nightly place of rest is an incredibly intimate and important element of every person’s life. Van Royen’s abstracted close-ups allude to personal spaces of unknown individuals. They are beautifully articulated, but somewhat perturbing. It feels inappropriate to view the clues to the life of ‘anyone’ without ever knowing them.

Similarly, Sydney-based Victoria Lawson’s series of interiors, Our Investment, are haunted by the non-presence of their occupants. The iconic Queenslander, designed to minimise the harshness of our weather, is the subject of her photographs.The houses have an appearance and feel that is familiar to Queensland residents. We expect them to creak, to have gaps in the VJs and floorboards, to be a tad dusty. Locals know these ‘defects’ are part-and-parcel with the dwellings - we mayeven celebrate such flaws.

There isn’t snideness in Lawson’s work. She celebrates the Queenslander. Tastes, fashion and changing fortunes are all evident. Objects that once showed the occupier’s fiscal success now look forlorn and even kitsch. Such items were once a gauge of affluence, but now suggest a possible lack of wealth. A veneered television box, once a stand-alone and focal piece of furniture, pales compared to a modern plasma screen. Similarly, town gas was once an innovation but now is standard fare. Some people want to see Queenslanders razed, others want them praised. (Recent footage of Cyclone Larry showed a man standing on his verandah as water flowed up to the third-top tread - all hail the cinder boxes on stilts!) The house in Lawson’s images was once a familial home but became a commodity for sale. Lawson documents as she reminisces.

Photographers can be likened to hired goons. They hawk their abilities and products to meet their market, and live a persona rather than exposing themself, the person. It is always an interesting endeavour when artists look within1 instead of exploiting their usual chosen subjects. The fields of painting and drawing are flush with self-portraits, but it is not so common in photography. Brisbane photographer Ian Poole initiated The Viewer and the Viewed as an investigation into how Queensland photographers see themselves, or moreover how they would like to represent themselves. Some results are humorous, some serious, some banal (intentionally or not). The audience is given a glimpse of individuals who spend their time capturing Queensland life in all its guises.

On the theme of portraiture, a photograph of a photographer taking a photograph of a photographer while standing in front of one of Australia’s most photographed icons, captured with a mobile pinhole camera, features in Travelling Light by Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart. Some people have an affinity for the road, for the country, for the landscape. Spowart and Cooper took a passion of theirs and, as photographers, upped the ante. Driving from Adelaide to Darwin along the Stuart Highway and pausing to take photographs was not enough. Instead they ‘became’ a camera. Cooper and Spowart transformed their car into a camera obscura, or pinhole camera. The resulting images are simultaneously interiors and exteriors, landscapes and portraits. They are not so much documents of the photographers’ expedition but reflections of their own existence. Rosalind Kraus and the Simulacrum pervade Spowart and Cooper’s enlightened journey to better understand The Self. The notion of side-trips is also evident in Cooper and Spowart’s artists’ books which not only document additional interests of the artists but also tourist/traveller paraphernalia that one inevitably encounters when travelling.

The human condition is an inexhaustible source of artist investigation. It continues to preoccupy artists and the resulting image still fascinate their audiences.

Gordon Craig (writer and curator, QUT Art Museum)

1 With thanks to the University Art Museum at the University of Queensland for their 2004 exhibition To Look Within: Self Portraits in Australia.