| Exhibition Details:
This photographic installation explores the theme of (re/de)construction through photographs and texts that centre on buildings and places in growth and decay. The installation is a study on the idea of frames and borders, and the way we use these to contain and reframe experience.
Using passages from his novel Flying in Silence, from his first poetry collection Neighbourhood of Memory, and from Winterlude (to be launched at the opening of the exhibition), the artist has tried to develop works that attempt to escape and challenge boundaries of genre, landscape and media. The collection comprises works etched on glass and on brass, of images framed in recycled timber or by corrugated iron. Indeed, in places, the Canadian images are contained by Australian woods, just as Australian poems are held in place by Canadian materials.
The exhibition is a fusion of the photographic and the poetic, a meditation on the idea of borders as frames, and of renovation as a language for change, migration, and escape. To achieve this many of the works have been allowed to cross over and contaminate each other. Similarly, some of the images were allowed to "infect" the poems, altering the text so that both image and word entered into a type of dialogue. The exhibition, then, is a meeting place of different landscapes and memories - it is both representative of the written works, but also beyond them. In that way, then, this exhibition contains poems that do not appear in any of the books, but also some that are subtly changed from their printed form, because every new frame - every context - alters the story. There are frames that contradict the works, others that act them out. Still others gesture at a contact yet to come.
The books and images are haunted by each other. And as in any relationship, the point of contact generates a different text, a scar that leaves its mark, that gestures towards another destination - a border crossing, in both the strictest, and the loosest, sense. |
