Open 11-5pm Fri-Sun until 12 May
Artists' talks:
Sat 4 May 3-5pm Linden Braye, John Gillies, Yvette Hamilton,
Sun 12 May 3-5pm: Loftus St Projects (Therese Keogh), Margaret Seymour, Sarah Woodward, Vsevolod Vlaskine.
Place and Image shows the work of Linden Braye, Curtis Ceapa, Damian Dillon, Merilyn Fairskye, John Gillies, Yvette Hamilton, Loftus St Projects (Carolyn Craig, Lyn Heazlewood, Therese Keogh and Kat Sawyer), Margaret Seymour and Sarah Woodward.
Place and Image reflects on relationships between the virtual space of the photographic image and the live space in which the image is located. The exhibition is curated by Articulate to explore ways in which the spatial concerns of Articulate can engage with the photographic concerns being emphasised by many exhibitions around Sydney during Head On.
ROOMSHEET
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L: Damian Dillon, centre: Margaret Seymour; R: Curtis Ceapa
Margaret Seymour The Crossing 2019
Digital prints on Hahnemuhle
paper 61 x 61cm, iPad, 1:24:29 video, silent.
Yvette Hamilton:
What was your experience of
'seeing' through data for this work, and are you influenced by the ideas of
nonhuman photography as proposed by Joanna Zylinska?
Margaret
Seymour: Thank you for this great question. I’m more familiar with
writers like Donna Haraway, whose work Zylinska builds on. Haraway considers
human interactions with other species, including machines, but not specifically
how they relate to image making. I’m grateful for this new lead. I particularly
like Zylinska’s idea that machine vision is a more embodied and immersive
approach to making images. Compared to the instantaneous, single point
perspective of the ‘camera eye,’ seeing through data can extend image capture
in time and in my case across space/place. And I’m also interested in your work
in the exhibition, specifically your description of the way the image on the
photographic paper increases in density over time. I think both our works have
a different kind of temporality and relationship to place when compared to
traditional photography.
My work for the Place and Image exhibition began with a nine-day road trip
across the Nullarbor. Before leaving Sydney, I made a device to attach to the
roof racks of the car. My homemade gadget automatically takes a picture every
60 seconds and then distils the colour information down to a single colour.
That single colour is then recorded as a hexadecimal number. Capturing the
colours was ‘blind process.’ I didn’t see what was being recorded until I got
back home. Talking with my travelling companion, we often laughed about the
possibility of ending up with a bunch of really boring colours. What would I do
with 7,000 different shades of beige?
Back
in Sydney I translated the data into actual colours and made nine images, one
for each day. Each image is comprised of vector paths arranged in concentric
circles, a bit like the growth rings of a tree. The final prints have very fine
detail and are ‘trippy’ in that they sometimes seem to produce the illusion of
movement. For me, the images retain something of the mesmerising tunnelling
effect experienced travelling by car through the arid interior of the country.
List of works in The Crossing
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damian
dillon How
soon is Now unique silver gelatin prints,electrical
tape and mapping pins 2019
Sarah Woodward: How do
you feel about new technology and social media, is there a place for it in your
work? I’m especially thinking about the subtlety in tone and texture that
the chemicals bring to your work which can only really be seen ‘in the flesh’?
Damian Dillon : My Photomedia
works are driven by concept, then process. New technologies, and the
convergence of analogue and digital are very much part of my contemporary practice.
I love and use both everyday.
As
for social media I love that it can be a place to promote ones practice and
share ideas, but mostly a place to look at cats. I like big fluffy ones and tuxedo’s
in particular
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Curtis Ceapa Untitled Photographic print on canvas, resin, photographic pigment.
Damian Dillon: How do you think your work fits into contemporary photo discourse?
Curtis Ceapa: My work fits within a contemporary setting through what I like to call
expanded photography. The idea of photography being erased from new
technologies, in my practice I have found a process that enforces the idea of
non traditional printing technologies and material qualities. The act of
overlapping and layering of hierarchical subversion within photo-media is an
investigation into the precision of digital printing. This process addresses an
exploration involving the manipulation and layering of photographic pigments
challenging mass reproduction and the uniqueness of the artists hand. I find
that the composition, the framing, the colour, the subject and the act of capturing
a moment outside of the camera is a form of contemporaneity, an idea of camera-less
photography as a whole.
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Yvette Hamilton Blind 2019, LED lights, photographic paper, location
Curtis Ceapa:
What are the topics or ideas that have sparked the work that will be at the
Place and Image show?
Yvette Hamilton:
My practice centres around vision, blindness and the image, and I operate
within an expanded photographic practice to speak of photography outside of
photography. At the moment, I'm particularly focused on two periods in the
photographic medium's timeline - that of the birth of photography, and
photography right now - with its rapidly evolving camera tech and the flood of
ubiquitous images. My practice reflects these two periods as well, in that I
make interactive, or programmed artworks using complicated coding techniques,
as well as very basic analogue cameraless photographs, such as photograms and
lumen prints.
For the work in the Place and
Image show, I want to examine the idea of exposure. This work is literally a
stab in the dark - I don't know how it will work out, but the idea is to create
an exposure for the length of time of the exhibition, by placing unexposed
photographic paper on the wall and exposing it in a lumen process using a
combination of the ambient light of the gallery and also a set of LED rope lights
that I have been playing with in the studio. Articulate is a gallery that often
encourages artists to engage with the space - the architecture of the
building, but also the fact that it's central proposition is as a project
space. Exhibitions often do not show 'finished' work, but rather, an evolving
work in progress. I wish to engage with both the state of the inherent dynamism
and 'unfixed' nature of Articulate as a project space, but also with the
physical space of the gallery itself.
The lights that I'm working with bend and loop and sort of mimic
the 'light-writing' of photography's etymology. The idea is to write with light
of the space, about the light of the space. The work will be a process led
installation, a sort of blind writing, because I won't know what I will have
really captured on the paper until I dismantle the installation and pull the
paper off the wall. This idea of blindness is also inherent in the process
itself - the installation involves a lumen process - which is one where the paper
is deliberately 'fogged' - the idea of gleaning an image from this photographic
print is a futile one, instead, what will be captured will be the activation of
the paper by the light over a long period. Whilst this work is very much about
photography, and in particular, the idea of the exposure, it also is equally
about the space and the way that an 'image' can very often fail at depicting
place.
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Loftus St Projects: Carolyn Craig, Lyn Heazlewood, Therese Keogh, Kat Sawyer 2019
Margaret Seymour: This work began
when you were demolishing of part of a house. Both the exhibition site and the
construction site are places in which ‘work’ happens. What similarities and
differences do these sites share? How has moving objects and images from one
site into another activated both spaces in new ways? What prompted you to start
making work this way?
Loftus St Projects
: Let’s begin with
your final question. This project began when Carolyn spied a concrete vibrating
motor in Therese’s studio about a year ago and asked her to come and test it in
her backyard, where she was in the beginning stages of demolishing a dodgy
extension in order to rebuild a nicer one. Kat and Lyn quickly came on board,
and what had started out as an afternoon of shaking foundations, turned into
months and months of meetings between the four of us as the house slowly
came down around us. Material was collected, dialogue was recorded, termites
were admired, and a web of different people and narratives met in and around
the activity of the demo. Slowly we began to make things too, which were first
shown at Carolyn’s house, and are now here at Articulate.
The question of activation feels slightly misplaced in this
context. The house was well and truly active on
its own, and we were just along for the ride. In relation to Articulate, that’s
tricky again, and possibly able to be answered through hindsight. We’ll see.
And lastly, your question of ‘work’ is a good one. Intense
material and emotional energy are expended in the process of renovating a
house. This is weirdly similar to the process of making an artwork, where all
kinds of physical and not-physical labour are invested. Material moves around a
backyard, as concrete is jackhammered up, and walls torn down, piling up,
spreading out. On a different scale, similar interactions and transformations
happen in studios. As stuff moves from one corner to another, it pulls in a
mess of feelings that then play out in a million ways through objects/images
made, or houses built.
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Merilyn Fairskye . #44484d
(cyberspace) 2019.
a. Pigment
Print. Image size 100 x 100 cm; b. Wall
Painting. Diameter: 100 x 100cm
John Gillies: What is the story behind this work?
Merilyn Fairskye: My work is often anchored to the
subjective human experience of ‘being there’. In the case of #44484d (cyberspace), this experience
occurs quite literally, in the visible place (of the initial fieldwork) where
an invisible (something) lurks, and for the viewer, it occurs metaphorically,
in the specific space and place of the work’s exhibition. ‘Being there’ re-places the photograph as
the field of vision. Particular encounters, incidents or understanding break
into perceived reality and completely reframe it.
In mid-2015 I set
off to Moscow, on my way to visit the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where I
planned to attend the launch of a manned space-flight, and also, stay at the
Cosmodrome Hotel, where Yuri Gagarin spent the night before he became the first
human to enter space on 12 April 1961.
I
never made it to Baikonur. The
very morning I departed Sydney for Moscow an unmanned cargo spacecraft
plummeted to earth shortly after take-off, and all visits to the launch site
were cancelled.
I
now had more time to kill in Moscow before I headed off to The Polygon, an
18,000 square kilometre site in northeast Kazakhstan where Soviet nuclear tests
were conducted during the years of the Cold War. I spend a couple of days in
the Moscow Space Museum, a memorial to all things
cosmonautical, where I’m drawn to the two taxidermied dogs near the entrance,
Strelka and Belka, the first animals to enter space and return to earth safely.
Nearby is the Vostok spacecraft that Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in, and his
orange suit. In another room life-like models of the food and plants that
accompanied the cosmonauts into space are displayed in vitrines.
Further
away a small, battered Soviet-era spacecraft floats between two staircases. In
its claustrophobic interior, a vintage cosmonaut’s jumpsuit appears to be
inhabited by a doppelganger. The jumpsuit is a strangely familiar shade of grey. It’s the default
background colour of many computer apps. I later discover that the Hex code for
this colour—#44484d — is the code for Cyberspace, a colour produced by American
house-paint company Sherwin-Williams. It is the punctum-in-place.
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L: John Gillies; centre: Merilyn Fairskye; R: Yvette Hamilton
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John Gillies Crack 2019, iPhone,
3:28 video, silent, edition
of 5
Therese Keogh: I'm curious about your interest in cracks, as a break in a surface, and
am wondering if you could unpack some of the meanings, materials, and moments
that are generated through productions and recordings of fissures?
John Gillies: I'm not just interested in literal cracks, but
the 'crack' that happens when a video image of a crack in a solid wall or floor
is superimposed with its referent. It's a unique aspect of the moving image from the Lumière brother's screenings onward. Cracks is an ongoing
series. I aim to place many cracks on many walls.
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Sarah Woodward shine forth upon our clouded hills? 2019
Sarah Woodward: What
is the relevance of the title?
Sarah Woodward: The name comes from the William Blake poem
Jerusalem. An unofficial anthem of my home country. Also a source of other
phrases that have become part of the landscape of England’s green and pleasant
land, of chariots of fire and of dark satanic mills. It evokes the notion that
things that were once visited by greatness, have been ruined, but can be great
once more.
For me shine forth upon our clouded
hills? Is a reflection on the idea that this landscape, the hills
where the Australian indigenous population made their home, are now
unrecognisable. But topography will always be. It is covered, by man-made,
and man-manipulated materials, underneath the shape remains. I’m not sure that
the current position is that diabolical, for me there is beauty in the texture
of our surroundings, if we look for it. Just as importantly the past has not
been destroyed, but should be observed. To be able to change the future.
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Linden Braye Helpful Viewing Tools….Continued
Around Corners plywood, paint, perspex, mirror, glass
Merilyn Fairskye: What is the story of your work i.e. How did it come to be?
Linden
Braye
‘Helpful Viewing Tools..Continued . .’ follows on
from previous works that sought to find ways to interact within articulate and
art works in alternative ways. The 'tools' bring into focus small and larger
aspects of the space. When looked through moving images can be observed and the
voids that would otherwise be unnoticed are shaped. In other tools, like the
louvred window, light creates the image and the time of day dictates the
changes across the floor. 'Helpful Viewing Tools' is site-specific but not
limited to Articulate, they can be used in brief moments while travelling or
waiting for trains.
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Place and Image is supported by an anonymous tax-deductible donation
