Crash but no burn... yet!

What an appropriate metaphor for (at least some) recent times!

The old BGC/Bunnings building at the bottom of Subi is no more. It was demolished this week.



The white wall with the ticket machine I shot and exhibited in 2004 was just one of it's faces. A huge and immaculate whitewashed wall that seemed to magically appear out of nowhere. It truly looked quite unreal in the right light.

The vier series that was exhibited at Kurb was shot inside the building. It was used as all day car parking for quite a while and the previous offices were easily accessible. I visited the site twice for the series and by the time I'd returned the second time - as it always seems to be - it had been significantly vandalised.

Transitions @ Kurb Gallery

I did a runaround last week and have uploaded the video on YouTube. Comments, as always, appreciated.

Vier

So... the work for the Kurb show (my portion at least) has been completed. It just needs a bit of TLC from Photad to get the surfaces right but other wise I'm happy with the outcomes.

I'm tentatively calling them vier which is German for four... it's also pronounced fear which is more than a word play.

My major ongoing series - drei (German for three) - has had an almost forensic attitude to approaching a scene. I enter a site with a degree of reverence, respect and often fear. These places are often unstable and fragile on a multitude of levels.

I come to these places after emotional connections have supposedly been severed. The associated 'decisive moments' have passed - catalogued or otherwise.

The protagonists are long since gone and the scene has often begun to decay. That which is left behind is the disposable and the unimportant - at least in the minds of those who have left these things.

This reverence and analytical approach transfers to hyper-real detail and a purity in technique. The drei images are lit by natural light, shot with an standard lense (close to 1:1), only mildly manipulated and typically uncropped.

My new work however addresses the pre-decisive rather than post-decisive moment.

vier explores a particular series of personal contemplative moments. Where a deep breath was taken, decisions were made and new processes begun.

This deals with the balance between observational study and manipulation within a scene. Not only in the choice of view point, lighting, digital manipulation and other visual devices but in content of the scene itself.

This is not to say that manipulation hasn't previously been a component in my practice. The manipulation has simply moved from selective imaging - ie. what is (not) photographed - and context to the content within the image itself.

I have begun to subtly inject elements and objects into that which is being imaged rather than merely document what I find.

Exciting times and a basis on which to develop a whole new series of work called fables.... more about that later!

Revelation...

Something I wrote to someone today...

'Much more an observer than an instigator'.

Normally in my practice I will approach a scene as 'unintrusively' as possible. That basically means I won't move things, 'tidy' up or dress a scene in any way. This is not just a conceptual approach as it's also to do with respecting the space itself.

I much prefer the discovery process in the visitation.

This has, however, recently changed and has been a philosophical centre point of my component of our show at Kurb (June 10-29).

It's odd how a VERY minor 'thing' that I did has opened up a whole new world. The ideas of immediacy, a 'fake' decisive moment and drama are now making me dizzy.