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gallery 1
Alison Langley’s work is an ongoing investigation into the construction and representation of illusory, miniature, photographic environments that are predominately quiet in their mood and solitary in their nature. Langley creates distinctive images that activate the perceptions of each individual viewer. Her images are tantalizingly ambiguous, often confounding the viewer about what is perceived, and what is actually observed.
Her work involves constant experimentation with the qualities and effects of light and colour, combined with the manipulation of the imagery through the use of magnifying photographic lenses, plant material and water.
Langley’s photographs are not digitally manipulated. Relying on an analogue system, Langley’s images originate as 35mm colour transparencies. This exhibition sees Alison expand the representation of her imagery through the use of light boxes exhibited alongside colour photographic prints, further enhancing the illumination and colour saturation of the imagery whilst remaining true to their original form.
Alison Langley is a Melbourne-based artist and was short-listed for the 2004 Siemens RMIT Fine Art Travel Scholarship.
gallery2
The human subject is a repository of observations and memory and a vehicle for social and political engagement. It can represent a meeting of minds, a quiet and mysterious interior life as potent as the external reality which shapes and sometimes threatens it.
With his drawings and paintings, Paul Ruiz explores the idea of ausencia humana, conceiving human studies in the ‘absence’ of the human subject. To explore ausencia is to find a place where human story, memory and imagination merge and sometimes collide with physical reality. In responding to ausencia Ruiz uses the surface like a terrain for mapping out what is remembered, what is known, and what is felt about being close to another person.
These works have been made with a range of media; charcoal, pastel, acrylic or oil paints. To varying degrees each surface is layered, scraped back and re-layered so as to document a process of seeing, responding and rethinking the human subject. The surface of each painting evolves as a journal of human curiosity and memory, of both subject and artist.
gallery 3
leaving the learning
Using the materials of early learning, chalk, ink and paper, Stan Smith continues his research into indigenous plants and foods. Smith’s approach is not to interpret the landscape, but a means to connect with it.
Similar to the cycle of seasonal flooding and drying Smith applies chalk and wet ink to the paper allowing it to pool and dry leaving sediment layers and tide marks.
Incorporated into his work are notations, detailed botanical descriptions and illustrations of local plants and foods. This is then combined with information that he has learned from local indigenous people, such as the use of various foods and descriptions of storage vessels. Each drawing is a journey through the landscape, and a connection to the past.
Combining his extensive knowledge of botany with his learning from the local indigenous people, Smith has produced a body of work that is part journal, part palimpsest… a physical outcome of a respectful connection to an area left long ago.
detail
opening night drinks
wednesday november 9
6-8pm
exhibition duration: november 8 - 26