A “combination of esoteric ideas from various fields” is the way Jack Lanagan Dunbar describes his first solo exhibition, under development for Sydney’s Alaska Projects. Lanagan Dunbar has worked collaboratively with his partner Kailana Sommer under the moniker KK+JLD and only recently appeared as a solo practitioner. This year he won the Emerging Artist Category of the Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize 2016, with an experimental photographic work depicting non-existent vases in space. These “vases” were “reconstructed artefacts”, produced using spinning rods captured with long photographic exposures.
For Alaska Projects, Lanagan Dunbar is trialling another new photographic process, called photogrammetry, which has its roots in map-making. In the two downstairs spaces of the car park gallery, he is presenting consecutive bodies of work. In the first introductory space, twenty steel chair frames create a sculptural form that resembles an auditorium. This installation is based on an image from the 1950s, showing a crowd, seated outdoors and wearing protective eyewear, on Adirondack chairs, watching a nuclear test in the Pacific Islands.
The second adjoining room holds a series of photographic works that fragment the image of an audience. The human figure, and its disparate parts, is photographed and represented from multiple perspectives. Lanagan Dunbar said, “I am creating a virtual version of the physical through photography. Various aspects of the anatomy of the audience are combined to create an amorphous humanoid–a smooshing together of body parts.” These are presented as flat framed images.
The exhibition develops Lanagan Dunbar’s interest in “the idea of an apocalypse or its aftermath”. His ideas seem almost prescient in their capture of the instability of current global events in their form and media.
None of us is as good as all of us
Jack Lanagan Dunbar
ALASKA Projects [Car park]
7 September – 25 September
Note: The title, None of us is as good as all of us, refers to an advertisement for McDonald’s on the back of a 1988 National Geographic magazine. The words are from a quote by McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc.
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