Scott Burton, Perth CBD, 2017, digital print on premium art stock.
Lucy Griggs, Pink and White Everlasting – Rhodanthe Chlorocephala subsp. rosea (previously Helipterum roseum) – Family Asteraceae, 2016, cyanotype, 26cm x 18cm.
Dan McCabe, -32.041913, 115.753677 (front), 2017, acrylic sheeting on alubond in custom frames, 87cm x 62cm.
Traditionally, photographs reveal the character of places like Perth through iconography or colour (Bankwest Tower, sunsets). “This is the opposite of that,” says curator Chelsea Hopper. With HERE&NOW17: New Photography, Hopper describes that the way a photograph is taken, the activity of looking, is equally compelled by place.
Snapped by iPhone on Perth’s four ‘corridor’ train lines, a series of tiny photographs by Scott Burton document the brightness and utility of the liminal spaces that link Perth’s gentrified precincts. Usually ‘exhibited’ on Instagram, Hopper relocates them to the gallery, articulating the vitality of the margins of photography.
In Kings Park, Lucy Griggs picks wildflowers (some native, some nominal natives). These are laid on cyanotype paper, which reacts to sunlight and records the blossom’s outline in deep indigo, the colour of Perth’s noon sky. “Perth is the sunniest city. We get 8.8 hours of sunlight a day,” Hopper reports. “Lucy uses this light as a camera.”
When impressed by a WA landscape, Dan McCabe purposefully commits it to memory, to later recreate using lustrous, coloured slates of Perspex for his Joiner series. Without using a camera, Hopper explains, McCabe is nonetheless looking, noticing, and taking a picture.
Driving on the Tonkin, Lydia Trethewey photographs the plaque lining Perth’s arterial airport highway: power lines, traffic furniture. Trethewey applies solvents to her prints, endowing them with a moody, warped surface. A 3000-frame animation collates these images into a billowing, sublime vision of inter-suburb travel.
HERE&NOW17 focuses not on what Perth looks like, but on ways of seeing Perth, how image crafting happens here: “This project is about photography, not of photography,” says Hopper.
HERE&NOW17: New Photography
Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery
29 April – 8 July
Have you ever wondered if someone who is no longer alive could create art? In answer to this question, biological artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Ringold, in collaboration with the now deceased Alvin Lucier, have extended the experimental composer’s “ideas about the resonance of sound” for their immersive exhibition, Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
A quiet power pulses through It’s Always Been Always at Fremantle Arts Centre, where six First Nations women artists reflect on kinship, Country and cultural memory.
Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.
Hobart-based Max Mueller’s In the Sticks exhibition at Handmark Gallery features oil-on-linen works that show tranquil scenes of Tasmania, musing on how nature is managed and maintained in a context of civilisation and curation.
Community is the foundation of Claire Conroy’s exhibition at Lismore Regional Gallery. As a new arrival to the area, her art practice ties her to fellow artists, while her medium, camera obscura, allows for a deepening of social connections with her sitters as they commit to the shoot.
Mungari, a landmark exhibition at Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum, marks the return of the Gweagal spears to their ancestral country while speaking to the constellation of relationships that knit together people, objects and place.
