2009

Marian Drew - Birds

Look! Dead Bird! This is my kind of wild life photography; forget the excruciating hours in a mosquito infested swamp courting malaria or worse. Far better to shoot it in the studio in civilised proximity to refrigeration and Japanese finger food. This series, “Birds”, is a development of Marian’s “Australiana” project which has been exhibited widely here and overseas. In this series she’s combined native birds, domestic fabrics and vessels as subjects.

A lot has been said about Marian Drews’ debt to European traditions of still life. The rich, painterly aesthetic she employs through her idiosyncratic application of light and her stylised composition certainly constitutes a nod to old masters and one could easily be forgiven for simply wallowing in the pleasures of seduction. But these images are more than a Euro centric speculation about the palatability of our plump breasted, native bird life; they’re embedded with a range of critical possibilities. Marian’s quoting the aesthetic conventions of the old world to initiate new dialogues between our past and our present, urging us to deeply consider our relationship with the place we live, both local and national, and the things we share it with. These pictures challenge the enduring conception of nature as a god given resource for us to squander at whim.

Be it modest peasant fare or a noble feast, the dinner table reveals a lot about the people who set it. It’s a place where our society’s shifting and often conflicting customs and practices of consumption are debated through ritual, where our social identities and roles are consolidated; one generation transmitting its expectations and values to the next, reflecting ideological affiliations of class that underpin our various conceptions of and aspirations for nationhood.

Drawing from symbologies of the intimate, the domestic and the feminine, these images evoke anxieties arising out of different values and priorities. They invite us re evaluate our conceptions of natural and artificial; civilisation and savagery; the domestic and the foreign, the rational and the spiritual; the new world we confront and the old one we’re leaving behind.

By placing what is indigenous to Australia in a visual context that invokes the spectres of our colonial past, these works form an eloquent metaphor for our current environmental discord. If we are to progress in harmony with nature, perhaps we might try and outgrow that childish assumption we have dominion over all that crawls, swims and flies.

Adriane Hayward + Aaron Burton 123 Days Away

While these bodies of work constitute separate and distinct responses to the problem of finding new ways to tell stories visually, they were produced in a spirit of close collaboration. Adriane and Aaron met while studying at QCA. Adrienne deeply involved in the area of art practice and Aaron committed to social documentary. After finishing their honours year, like so many young Australians, they packed themselves off to South East Asia on a voyage of discovery.

“123 Days Away” challenges the idea that there are clear lines of demarcation between art and documentary areas of photo media practice. The artists drew on their respective disciplines to construct complimentary narratives to trace their journey. Adriane collects objects as souvenirs, bus tickets, plastic cutlery, miniature shampoo bottles, bits of string; the sorts of things we usually overlook or discard. Back home she uses a flat bed scanner to collage narrative assemblages. Aaron takes a more traditional approach, SLR slung over his shoulder; he searches for revealing or ironic moments taking place before his cameras lens. The resulting images are combined with entries from his travel diaries. Both Adriane and Aaron’s bodies of work interweave to construct journals of sorts. While the strategies used by each artist produce very different outcomes, they both culminate in evocative, anecdotal narratives told with poetry, allegory, irony, evidential authority and sincerity.

Lindy Wissler - Undercurrents

At Bribie Island, like the rest of the world, the natural environment is in tension with progress. Pine plantations compete with national forest for the native landscape; the scrub is excavated for new estates, many of which are claimed to be ‘green’. But how can the natural forest and brush land co exist with any modern human settlement of any size?

Increasingly humans seem entirely incompatible with nature. I know I am, I like my air-conditioned, my climate controlled, my water chlorinated and my plants and animals on a plate. Each generation develops it’s own relationship with nature which find expression through cultural means. The wide-screen, plasma, oracle box in the lounge room is the prime generator and mediator of our culture and it paints a bleak picture. The 21st century vision of nature is increasingly one of a vengeful deity bent on punishing us for lacking piety with rising sea levels, melting ice caps and rising temperatures; it lashes us with all kinds of fury, floods, fires, tsunamis. Caspar David Friedrich’s early 19th century, romantic version of nature was a pussycat compared to the one peddled on our screens.

In this vision, nature is not a thing to be trusted and it’s understandable why we would push it to the margins. The recent bushfires in Victoria have reinforced the necessity to clear the area around the sites we inhabit of natural stuff to avoid catastrophe. How can we use water-harvesting strategies to provide water to long-term draught stricken areas if we are not to further disrupt the planet? We like to idealise nature as our generous friend, to honour it with our carefully maintained gardens, after all we can’t live with out it, but as we pay the price of over population and over exploitation our relationship with nature must become increasingly complex. We become distant, opposed and distrustful.

“Undercurrents” is a body of work that acknowledges the ambivalence with which we must regard nature at a time when we are told nature is reasserting her powerful presence. Images of different worlds each with its particular values, tastes, and concerns layered upon another.

Paul McCann – “Natural Progression"

There are a variety of ways to photograph a city; you can produce propaganda by taking early morning photographs of wholesome, smiling young actors roller-blading past local landmarks, dressed in wardrobe selections from the last margarine or tampon commercial they appeared in. You can focus on urban universalities, sacrificing the particular character and local flavour of the place to address broader issues like alienation, globalisation and consumer culture, a la Gursky. You can mythologise the place, present it in poetic terms, infuse it with your own seductive narrative, invent it for an audience who’ve yet to visit it. Think of Brassai’s Paris, Weegee’s New York, or Henson’s Melbourne (I’ve been to Melbourne and it’s not always night)!

The fortunes of our urban precincts are constantly shifting due to progress. Areas and landmarks that were once the focus of civic pride have fallen into neglect and disrepair, awaiting inevitable erasure in the wake of the next wave of gentrification.

As newcomers move to Brisbane at an unprecedented rate, the city is being rapidly transformed. Once fashionable retail, industrial and residential precincts now lay fallow, awaiting development. In these spaces the stories of the past co exist with ones yet to be written. Their traces inhabit disused buildings and overgrown, untended gardens like ghosts awaiting exorcism.

Anna Jacobson – “Doll Awakenings”

Clowns and old dolls go together with creepy noises like axes and locked doors or weird kids and ouija boards. Anna Jacobson has a preoccupation with abandoned spaces and old things; she uses them to animate possible histories and recreate frightening tales out of her childhood imaginings. She brings these dark fairy tales to life using experimental video, stop motion photography and the hauntingly discordant sounds of old clockwork music boxes.

Ray Cook

Artist and PhD canditate, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University