Another Melbourne artist, Ross Coulter, brings us the results of a four-year project in which he has documented audience members in Melbourne gallery spaces. Drawing on his interest in conceptual art of late 1960s and ‘70s, Coulter invited local art community members to a photo shoot and they were instructed to imagine viewing a performance art event. Finch describes the installation of more than 400 photographs as a sort of performance for the camera.

Patrick Pound provokes us, too, to ponder the huge variety of territory covered by photography, which was once viewed as being purely documentary in nature. An inveterate collector and cataloguer of found photographic images scoured from internet auctions and second-hand dealers, Pound is admired for his ability to settle on poetic groupings that reinvent meanings and lead us into unexpected contemplation. Finch describes The Great Exhibition as the largest and most compre- hensive showing of his work to date. “He has an intense fascination about the way things can hold and project ideas,” she says, adding that we will see some vast new collections drawing on his acquisitions, grouped into sometimes enigmatic themes in the same spaces as an array of objects selected from the NGV collection.

“It is his lovely idea of giving those [NGV] works a sabbatical from their ‘agreed meaning’ and encouraging audiences to rethink things, especially when these works are placed alongside his own objects,” she says. “It will be a very beautiful installation experience and that connection between artworks, objects and viewers means audiences will have to do the work to find their own connections, while seeing his connections at the same time.”