Image: Steven Rhall
Breadfan 2015
courtesy the artist
Exhibition Dates: 24 April–28 June | Opening: Thursday 23 April 6–8pm
CCP Australia, 404 George Street, Fitzroy
Website: http://www.ccp.org.au/
GALLERY ONE | Kiron Robinson We told ourselves we needed separate beds to sleep
A flat surface, flattened, flattened again.
I don’t believe in photographs. They are anxious. I am anxious. I enjoy making them.
Through a process of flattening, via scanning, re-photographing or both, images are made together. New relationships are forced. The surface reflects my anxiousness as the space that is both image and image of image.
Kiron Robinson is a Lecturer of Photography in the School of Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne. Kiron Robinson is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.
GALLERY TWO In debt: saving seeds Dave Jones and Steven Rhall respond to the Australian Grains Genebank
On the Wimmera plains harsh sun greys the timber cladding of the enormous freezer that is the Australian Grains Genebank (AGG); a storehouse of knowledge and seeds for the development of the next generation of food. Half a world away, deep in a mountain, on an island north of the Arctic Circle lie the keys for survival of the world’s food supply. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a highly secure facility cradles the genetic building blocks of all of the world’s plant based foods.
In 2014, AGG deposited 7,143 grass, pulse, grain and legume seed samples within the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, including samples from 943 indigenous plants, distant relations to the world’s current crops and collected from Northern Australia including the Kimberley, Arnhem Land and Cape York.
To ensure this credit for our future, AGG stores and documents the life of our seeds through long-term cold storage, germinating, trial crops, measuring and recording. Their knowledge grows to be shared with plant breeders and farmers working with a changing climate.
In responding to the science and purpose of AGG, Dave Jones and Steven Rhall have brought a different kind of knowledge and skill, arising from their divergent creative practices. The artists have addressed its significance and presence within the regional landscape as well as in the imaginations of young people who stand to inherit both the debt of declining plant diversity and AGG’s inspiring legacy.
Steven Rhall, a Melbourne-based Taungurung man, is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice grows from documentary photography. Rhall responded to the site, staff and work of the AGG after a residency at the facility in March 2015.
Natimuk-based animator, Dave Jones collaborates with students from the local primary school and the AGG to illuminate our farming future. Through a series of animations, sharing the thoughts of our future farmers, these stored seeds come to life to revegetate the Wimmera.
This exhibition is commissioned and presented by Horsham Regional Art Gallery (HRAG) and Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) as part of ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2015, presented by CLIMARTE. We acknowledge generous support from the Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund; Milton and Penny Harris; and Ricci Swart. We thank the Australian Grains Genebank, Victorian Department of Economic Development for their engagement with the project.
Presented as part of ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2015
GALLERY THREE Paul Adair, Fleur van Dodewaard, Andrew Hazewinkel, Arini Byng and Georgia Hutchison, Stephanie Lagarde and Stein Rønning Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography
Curated by Laura Lantieri and Sarah Wall
Through the work of seven local and international artists, Lit from the Top considers the ways in which sculpture and photography intersect in contemporary art practice. From a range of perspectives, the artists approach the photograph as site for the creation of sculptural compositions, rather than simply a method and means for their documentation. With a particular emphasis on material, form, surface, space and the image-making process, collectively their works question medium specificity and trace the ambivalent relationships between object and image, the original and the copy.
Taking its title from Sol LeWitt’s serial photographic study, A Sphere Lit From the Top, Four Sides, and Their Combinations, the exhibition explores the interplay between photography and sculpture, image- and object-making, and how these artists mediate and reimagine each medium through the prism of the other – from sculptures re-presented as photographs, to photographs rendered as sculpture.
SUPPORTED BY
The Australian Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Mrs Janet Holmes à Court and the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts.
GALLERY FOUR Sara Oscar From Here to Eternity
From Here to Eternity borrows its title from the 1953 Hollywood film by Fred Zinnerman. The iconic love scene in Zinnerman’s classic film features actors Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing in a passionate embrace amongst the lapping waves of Halona Cove, Hawaii. The scene culminates in the camera’s turn from the actors to the crescendo of breaking waves on the beach. The repetitive rolling of the waves implicitly suggests off-screen romantic activity, and this sets the stage for Sara Oscar’s exhibition. Her show, From Here to Eternity is a series of photographic stills taken from the censored love scenes of classic films and projected on an old-fashioned slide projector. They are, in effect, placeholders for sex scenes, replete with innuendo and suggestion. The work plays with the relationship between the still photograph and cinema, and the romance of eternal love and separation. In an age of explicit cinematic representation, Oscar’s work plays on the outmoded language of sexual ruination and imagery that taps into the collective imagination to prolong and conceal sexual activity.
NIGHT PROJECTION WINDOW Greg Moncrieff California Re-visited
In the 1980’s I spent six months in Oakland California and during that time used photography extensively to record my reaction to American life in general but more specifically the urban decay evident in the Oakland area resulting from the extensive use of crack cocaine. Recently I culled colour transparencies from that period and before dumping this material it was put aside and became altered by moisture and other elements. I responded to this unexpected ‘collaboration’ and saw that chance had in many cases resulted in images that had considerable presence. The altered transparencies were then scanned and the images presented in several formats. As projected images in digital form, these works have reappeared, via a convoluted journey, to be seen in the form in which I had initially intended.