2 March - 15 April 2023
VIEW2023 Catalogue Essay
Photoaccess
I arrived in Canberra during summer at the end of 2020. My car, which was packed full of kitchen items, bedding, a short life’s worth of trinkets, has no air conditioning. It was very hot.
I remember looking at my phone and seeing that I was 22 minutes away from my destination: a flat in Campbell I had rented sight unseen, straight off the internet. I remember being overtaken by a truck with red neon lights along its chassis and a profane bumper sticker displaying a hula-hooping lady in the style of a Sailor Jerry tattoo. Sailor Jerry is my favourite tattoo artist. As I approached my new home I was struck by the vast space surrounding me, a novel kind of excess in comparison to where I’d come from, where footy fields seemingly outnumbered houses and the verges stretched further than my childhood backyard. Canberra is sparse
At university I wrote a master’s thesis on art in public places and became heavily interested in how environment might impact not only one’s sense of belonging, but also one’s artistic output. Canberra is a city full of space, used and unused. It is a place where unlike the big cities of Melbourne or Sydney, long aspects remain visible in inner-suburbs. It is a young city, requiring residents to create afresh rather than respond to existing heritage and culture. And although it is considered a ‘garden city’ with fewer suburban hedges than any other municipality in Australia, the divide between public and private is strong, where significant portions of life and social events take place in the domestic sphere.
As a student, I remember reading Jurgen Habermas’ 1961 book The Public Sphere. In it, Habermas describes ‘public space’ as an intermediary point between private life and the state – in essence where the people, the rule makers and the trendsetters meet. He discusses the importance of our public spaces, positing the need for these meeting points to allow for citizens to engage in discourse, to share ideas, and to contribute democratically to the formation of their environment.[1] In Canberra I often think of Habermas’ ideas and wonder how the vastness of Canberra influences its artmaking inhabitants; sometimes wondering whether the oversaturation of potential meeting places coupled with the sometimes-privatisation of social events might support highly stylised and individualistic artistic practices.
VIEW is an annual photo media-focused award exhibition hosted in PhotoAccess’ Huw Davies Gallery. It provides a survey of emerging artists in the ACT and surrounds and helps in our understanding of how local creative practices engage with contemporary issues. VIEW2023 brings together the works of seven artists: Harry Merriman, April Widdup, Gabriela Renee, Emily April O’Neill, Chenfei Xiao, Aaron Sun, and Aidan Gageler. It hosts multimedia installations, traditional and non-traditional photo media and animation. Its themes explore process, marginalisation of people of colour, the queer body, and the environment. Each artist explores a sense of self and responds to shared place, whether environmental, social or digital. Together, VIEW2023 provides an intra-related perspective created by Canberran artists which enables discourse between independent makers in the city.
Physical space, in particular natural landscapes and environments, are explored by Harry Merriman, an artist who works within an extended photographic practice. His works investigate the natural environment which surrounds the ACT and offers respite from places that are stereotypically public and come under social scrutiny. A current MFA student at UNSW, Merriman’s practice investigates the impact humans have had in the shaping of our physical and natural landscapes, and in turn how our created or altered environments affect our sense of self.
Merriman’s interest is trained on the Australian landscape. His three-channel work in VIEW2023 titled Landscape of Light is set in rural Australia and trails a rural property throughout the day. It offers shots of first light atop boulders, fields and trees, cascading light trickling in through cracks and gaping holes in eerie barns, shots of skies and fields, and finally, a sunset over a rustic house. Landscape of Light is a used by the artist as a catalyst to focus on environmental change. It asks audiences to pause and observe how something might look at a particular moment, and how extraneous influences beyond light, such as the roar of cars, radios blaring and chirping birds might attach or affix new meaning to the world we’re experiencing.
Artists April Widdup and Gabriel Renee evoke the public space and its limitations through sharing personal stories and asking how their identities might contribute to a new public space, or how existing public norms force them to navigate their environments differently. April Widdup is a sculptor whose works explore place and isolation from a queer perspective. Widdup’s practice navigates spatial coding, a means of operating and directing bodies within places that often cause people who fall outside bodily norms to experience unease and vulnerability. Widdup’s works are heavily Kantian in philosophy, drawing on the idea that place is linked to the body.[2] Their works seek to bring attention to spatial coding and offer a revision as a means of challenging and reforming social issues experienced by queer people navigating public space.
Widdup’s contribution to VIEW2023 is a sculptural work titled “You lived, and I will remember that" which acknowledges the dangers faced by queer people in public places. Comprised of recycled wood, hot sculpted glass, mirrors, LED lights, MDF, vinyl and sheet glass, their mixed media piece fractures observers’ views of a video through several glass balls. Through form and display, ‘You lived, and I will remember that’ utilises the symbol of refraction to scrutinise the process of observing queer bodies in public spaces, representative of societal norms which marginalise or misrepresent queer people. Further, it questions how queer people might typically be grieved, remembered as victims or placed into a historical narrative. “You lived, and I will remember that” seeks to spark new traditions for remembering, mourning and most importantly healing” says Widdup.
Gabriela Renee is a Canberran-based artist of Sinhalese, Malay, English, Shetlander, German and Irish descent. Her practice, which is governed by complex cultural and personal narratives, seeks to posit art as a tool for reconnecting and restoring people with fragmented family histories, and for the artist herself to gain agency throughout the process of exploring her diasporic identity. Renee’s practice is multidisciplinary, often combining found materials and objects from her family archives with made objects to create immersive installations that reimagine and recontextualise her hybrid cultural identity.
Renee expands on her multidisciplinary investigation of personality in VIEW2023 by presenting a mixed media installation titled Gedara Yanavā, Going Home. Gedara Yanavā is a kaleidoscopic artwork consisting of photographs, a home-burnt CD in fluorescent casing and a sari. It is linked to a childhood memory of dancing at home to a Bollywood song which she called ‘the mermaid song’ for her family at age four. Playfully evoking the divide between public and private, the work humorously indicates to the viewer a level of intimacy through the display of family photographs while engaging with wider cultural influences and norms which are evoked through traditional clothing and a mass-produced CD. Renee’s work explores her mixed cultural and ethnic identity and is focused on her heritage. Gedara Yanavā revisits an innocent and intuitive connection to herself at a juvenile period where cultural norms and identities are yet to be formed. From a mature lens however, it allows Renee a line of reconnection to a cultural memory formed at a time prior to an understanding of societal norms or expectations.
Emily April O’Neill is an interdisciplinary artist who incorporates technology and biology into her practice. She looks at the overlapping of life and technology in the modern age, questioning how the line of public and private is being redrawn and how that redrawing might affect us. In particular, O’Neill is concerned with the ability of emerging technology to alter personal rituals, intimate spaces and identities.
For VIEW 2023, O’Neill considers the intertwining of physical and virtual ecologies through an interactive algorithmic installation titled Between Bodies and Screens. Formed of projection, newsprint and printed fabric the work, which is managed by a customised JavaScript program, evokes the spiritualism of the desk and desktop: a considered place for ritual work, virtual intimacy and online identity. Through combining digital ephemera, an audio installation and a physical space, Between Bodies and Screens forces its viewers to consider how the boundaries of the physical and the digital might be dissolving, and how customs revolving the use of new technologies, which once seemed fringe, are now inescapable. Each experience with Between Bodies and Screens is unique, with a newsprint being projected across the space, generated in time while the viewer moves through the work.
Chenfei Xiao is a contemporary multimedia artist who uses digital and augmented reality technologies to make sense of the modern world. Their artworks share similar tropes and ideas with April O’Neill’s, but focus on the plethora of influences and manifestations in digitised public spaces including hyper-participation, neo-animism and increased interactivity. Xiao’s contribution to VIEW2023 is a headset-based augmented reality experience that explores topics of queerness and religion. Titled Guan Yin Help You, Xiao’s 2022 work is a result of personal and lived experience as a queer Chinese Buddhist. It is derived through mixed scenography across three rendered portraits of a figure: one shrouded in mist, another portrayed in deity like fashion atop a dreamlike dining-room setting, and a third clear closeup holding an array of objects including sex toys, tissues, condoms and socks with their many arms.
The figure in its forms and environments represents Xiao’s several identities, from a conforming and normative Buddhist person, to a queer person navigating a historical belief system. Xiao evokes the iconography of the Thousand Hand Guan Yin, a Buddhist goddess who is worshiped for her virtues of altruism and her ability to help people resolve problems in their daily life. In her first rendering, Guan Yin presents a stereotypical Buddhist iconography in an augmented framework. However, recontextualised within a dreamlike rainbow environment and surrounded by objects of sexual desire, she represents a mortal problem with the human condition, and the challenge within stereotypical religious discourse that excludes or avoids queerness.
Aidan Gageler is an abstract artist based between Awabakal and Yuin Land (Lake Macquarie and South Coast NSW) whose practice combines traditional photo-production techniques with arcane scientific materials that utilise antique substrates and exhausted chemistry. Gageler works on film but never uses a camera, rethinking photography and photographic mediums, and showcasing an alternative methodology towards the production and development of film. Through removing the camera from the production process and applying chemicals and substrates directly to film, chance controls the development of Gageler’s artworks and sustains focus on intelligible markers and the randomness of chemical materiality.
As a collection, Gageler’s two works in VIEW2023 are eponymously [PW1] titled The Giver, taking inspiration from the 1993 novel by American author Louis Lowry. In her novel, Lowry conjures a utopian society which is revealed to be dystopian as the story progresses. Colour in The Giver is significant, where the society is initially described as black and white, symbolic of a devoid and emotionless place, however as the novel progresses, colour is reintroduced and the protagonist of the story, a 12-year old boy named Jonas, is enlightened and begins to experience a more fulfilling range of emotions.
Gageler’s two works in VIEW2023, Little Joys and Walking Up That Hill Again, parallel the range of colour and emotion in Lowry’s novel. Walking Up That Hill Again is void-like and consists of primarily grey and black colours that form cloud-like patterns around an overexposed white rectangle in its centre. It is a stoic feeling artwork that evokes a sense of wishfulness through its light centre. Little Joys is a contrasting work that has predominantly a pink and light-purple hue and feels to me like an expression of serenity and enlightenment. Together, Gageler’s The Giver series provides an immediate encounter with photography, and a demonstration of the capabilities of photo-development through varied approaches of light, time and chemistry. They construct a resonance and provide, through themselves as object, hopefulness.
Place means many different things to many different people, even with shared common localities, experience and knowledge. When artists present works, although they are influenced by their surroundings, artistic displays are intrinsically individual.[3] VIEW2023 is a highly stylised exhibition, showcasing a rendition of Canberra and beyond which is non-homogenous. The artists involved push the boundaries of photo media within contemporary arts practices, and allow their viewers to understand afresh how a local creative practice engages us with local and global contemporary issues.
With multilayered and multifaceted approaches to presenting works within a photo media context, and in the cultural and geographical context of Canberra and the surrounds, VIEW2023 and its artists showcase the range of potentials for a local arts practice, looking both inward and outward.
[1] Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Mit Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962. P.14
[2] Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkley: University of California Press, 1998.
[3] Michael, de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: University of California Press, 1988. P117.
image: Guan Yin Help You II, 2022, Chenfei Xiao. Courtesy Photoaccess