Shoot Low! They are riding Shetlands.

There was a time, not so long ago, that the camera did not lie. Photographs and moving images of the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Great Depression in the US by the Farm Security Administration and Vietman War, for instance, seemed so authentic that they have shaped thought and changed the tide of public opinion. While mobile phone cameras continue to be a problem, recent governments have learned to shield their constituencies from images that shed a harsh on their policies. Shoot low! They are riding Shetlands postulates some new models of political commentary that move away from ‘obsolete’ concepts of truth or fact, and address the issue of how photography can maintain its political relevance in an era of multi media realities.

Enter Priscilla Bracks, whose current practice emanates from a website that mimics and mocks its own importance by employing images and (increasing amounts of) text to generate an on going fiction that responds to and satirizes developments in global politics. But her work is versatile, portable and adapts easily to the gallery context, manifest in the form lenticular photographs which, in their failure to effectively connect with the third dimension, are perhaps the most unreal of the photo media. Bracks fights fire with fire, presenting provocative works that are as entertaining, as they are critical and attractive, engaging or perhaps seducing audiences in a familiar world that mirrors actual experience. Making the Empire Cross focuses on the industries of news, gossip and glamour, effectively exposing under the radar politics and hanging notions of truth out to dry. This exhibition is based on the website and covers three episodes of the story so far. It’s a familiar story but never told in quite this way.

Leah Emery’s works originated following an accident on the information super highway when a sexually explicit spam email caused her to reconsider some common attitudes to pornography. “Not having been a connoisseur of pornography before this chance encounter” she says, “ I began to muse on the power of the sexually explicit human form” and thus began a fascinating series of works that blends art and craft, photography, pornography and cross stitching. Emery’s works are a rejoinder to the ubiquitous nature of hard core porn and an attempt to reclaim the natural beauty of the human body through the transfiguration of skin into the craft of the domestic cross stitch. In this way Emery provides her audience with several possible responses to the work: to stand back and decipher the erotic nature of the work, to focus on the colour or craft of the complex stitching or perhaps just to ponder on how such images invade our space via the most dominant domestic appliance of the 21st century.

There’s another kind of porn that is not quite so ubiquitous but well-known in popular culture through films such as the SAW series and Hostel 1 & 2 - torture porn. Perhaps the most challenging of all pornographies in its bizarre celebration of sex, violence and severed body parts it is here that we might, to some extent, locate responses to Chris Bennie’s excruciating single channel video of a loose toenail being slowly ripped from the skin. Much of Bennie’s recent work exists in a zone of contradicting crossovers, where for instance, he presents the totally ordinary as being extra-ordinary. No matter which extremity he is working with, ultimately Bennie hopes that a certain cleansing or catharsis will take place. In this video, for those who are able to watch, it he creates a path for transcendence from the grotesque, brutal nature of the work. Thus the act of separating the toenail becomes an acknowledgement of base level human experience – death and regeneration.

Pornography is also on the mind of Johnathan McBurnie as he asks if his photographic works become more controversial by way of the association between photography and erotica. Working with both drawing and photography McBurnie attempts to work on the border of both, generating (interestingly in relation to Bennie’s works) visceral images that may not be too far removed from a ‘slasher aesthetic’. His use of a female model in cruciform draw upon the brutal yet effective imagery of Roman Catholicism which, with no small thanks to Mel Gibson’s Passion, has rendered God’s sacrifice ever more degrading in its Gothic excess. Unlike the other artists in this exibitions, McBurnie is somewhat nervous of the camera and yet by setting out with an old Pentax, he maintains a closer relation to film than most. After that, however, its no holds barred as he fuses the digital and analogue, drawing and photography. Although his original question re pornography is rhetorical it is indeed a mix of media, as well as his use of the female heroine to represent himself, that gives the images their edge.

Nathan Corum is one of a new generation to experience the profound sense of absence generated by the over night demolition of Brisbane’s Cloudland Ballroom in 1982. An architectural masterpiece, the Cloudland was the physical and emotional heart of the city: a repository of youthful memory for each generation from the 1940s to the early 1980s. From the war time big band ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ to Buddy Holly and the Clash, pop culture’s giants have pieced together a legend that continues to gain momentum. Corum utilizes Matte Painting, the cinematic precursor of digital effects that by way of its obsolescence carries a similar theme to the structures depicted. This “lost” technique effectively focuses on symbolic structures such as Cloudland, Festival Hall and Rollerland as places of entertainment and social activity that can no longer be experienced but thrive and survive in collective memory. His painted (before) and photographic (after) shots emphasise loss and ‘maintain the rage’. From a political point of view they exist as an ongoing warning to those who would tamper with the dreams of a city.

Pamela See’s work relates to her experiences during a recent visit to China and although it isn’t intended to comment on Chinese domestic politics it does acknowledge that Mao is still revered in a god like fashion by many Chinese people. Thus the traces of communism are evident. Many of her new works relate to the sense of sadness and dislocation that has resulted from a period of sweeping cultural change, industrial development and western commercial influence. In this series See creates works on paper from a blend of old Chinese propaganda and new advertising material all of which is currently available in Beijing. The leaves apparent in a number of pieces symbolize new cultural influences taking root while also serving as a metaphor of decay. There is a delicate, fragile, even nostalgic quality to these works that are indicative of the artist’s interest in the idea that change is both incremental and constant, like the movement of plants. This, she notes, is particularly apparent in China at the moment.

An aficionado of early Disney culture Maurice Ortega presents a very different view of the Mickey Mouse we have become familiar with over the last 80 years. Ortega’s Mickey is initially black and something of a swaggering sex god who has been tamed over the years for increasingly puritanical public consumption. In his new work we find the iconic mouse at the centre of a developing narrative that refects the episodic nature of comic books and the Saturday matinee. In terms of structure and the sequencing of frames Ortega cites comic strip innovators such as Guido Crepax and quotes Marvel’s Moebius for the construction an existential heroic vision that is removed from political propaganda. Continuing his focus on the “hero’s journey” in classical mythology Ortega presents Mickey Mouse as a hero in reverse providing an interesting parallel to the decline of the Disney original- from spirited hero to thoroughly sanitized mouse.

David Broker is a writer, curator and director of Canberra Contemporary Art Space