home | exhibition program | archive | services | proposal guidelines | floorplan | contact us
3 - 20 march 2010
opening night drinks wednesday 3 march 6-8pm
The Minefield and the Lotus
This series of photographic works was captured in Ba Ria-Vung Tau (formally Phuc Tuy) province in Vietnam over the course of the past two years. The portraits use as a backdrop an actual event that occurred in Vietnam in 1966: the laying of an 11 kilometre minefield in this area by the Australian Army.
Horvat's images feature Vietnamese and Australian service personnel who were involved in the Vietnam/American war. As he reveals, 'these portraits seek to explore the effects of conflict upon service personnel of both sides. The lotus flower, which for centuries has been known not only for its great beauty but also for its ability to rise from the mud, is used as a metaphor for renewal and growth and as a signifier of place.'
Situated in the landscape of contemporary Vietnam, these black and white and colour photographs offer a personal window onto the rememberings of individuals clustered around a highly volatile moment in time and space.
Les Horvat is an established Melbourne-based photographer. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions and for many years worked as an advertising photographer. He currently teaches at the Photography Studies College Melbourne, where he has the role of Academic Director.
Options in Servitude
‘The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience would not be to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.’ Marcel Proust ‘The Captive’
Catherine Pilgrim’s latest body of work examines the process of drawing and the subjective nature of representation. The images have been compiled from digitally scanned fragments of personal photographs as well as scanned fragments of the artist’s lithographs. Textures of the everyday are reflected in Pilgrim’s subjects – food, fabric, clothing and other domestic elements.
For Pilgrim, memory and personal history are understood as essential elements of the process of drawing. Options in Servitude focuses on fragments pulled from larger images in an attempt to engage with Roland Barthes’ idea of the ‘punctum’ (the highly personal and deeply meaningful aspect of a photograph), while questioning the identification of the focal point in any given representation. The shift from analogue drawing to digital scan is crucial in this regard, and serves to introduce an element of distance between each image and its original incarnation. As Pilgrim explains, ‘Capturing’ of a referent is relevant to all representational images, and these pictures attempt to capture not only the subject but also a little something of the interpretive process.’
Catherine Pilgrim lives and works in Castlemaine, Victoria. Her works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Australia. This is her second solo exhibition at red gallery.
Darkroom
Darkroom is the premiere of Hoang Tran Nguyen's new single-channel video work, October (After Đặng Nhật Minh). The installation features an edited and processed version of a feature film Nguyen recently discovered from Vietnam. As Nguyen remarks, 'Post 1975, the country was reunited but living in poverty, leaving limited resources for film-making. Furthermore, cultural production became largely the domain of propaganda. When I first watched director Đặng Nhật Minh’s When the tenth month comes’ (1988) on DVD I experienced a time shift. The film tells the story of a war-widow who struggles to conceal the fate of her dead husband to his family and the village. Although the black and white film was made in the late 1980s, it seemed like it could have come from the ‘50s.'
For October (After Đặng Nhật Minh), Nguyen has re-processed this original footage using dated video technologies to obtain a ‘muted’ look, similar to the aesthetic of old VHS tapes. All scenes with dialogue and accompanying music have been erased, leaving a soundtrack comprised mostly of film ‘dust’. The duration of the work is 1 hour 25 minutes, the length of the original film. There are long periods of darkness throughout. The exhibition title Darkroom alludes to the installation of work in a 'black box' context, and to a now 'outmoded' workspace for the chemical processing of photographs. The generational shift that emerges between subject and audience is accentuated by the technological apparatus that enables their representation.
Hoang Tran Nguyen works across the spectrum of photography, video, projections and events. He has participated in numerous arts festivals and exhibitions including the Big West Festival, Next Wave, Footscray Community Arts Centre, Seoul Fringe Festival, Melbourne City Library, Bilo Artspace, and FauxPho studios, Footscray.
Download exhibition catalogue essay by Michael Bullock (PDF 359 KB)
