Stranger Than Fiction

Photography has the capacity to make strange everyday sights and accepted viewpoints. This transformation may occur by means of an unexpected vantage point or by the isolation of a detail from its usual physical locale or cultural/ historical context. The photographs and sculpture in this exhibition are by six contemporary Australian artists whose methods come from the tradition of still life. They all work in their studios where they have arranged disparate materials and constructed quite artificial scenes.

Conventionally, photographers who work with still lifes have been concerned with the formal qualities the colour, shape and volume of pre-existing, arranged objects. In contrast. the significance of the objects and references within these contemporary works of art arises from their cultural and historical connotations, by subverting these, the artists imply undercurrents and various meanings that exist beneath their superficial appearances.

Human presence has infiltrated these works: it affirms their status as fabrications. The artists propose unlikely juxtapositions, incorporate detritus and manufactured objects, and alter elements before or during the photographic process. Such intervention can completely change the appearance of (or our perception of) common objects and bestow new meaning upon them. The impetus of these six artists is conceptual, centering on the ideologies and material attributes of photography or coming more generally from the history of art and ideas. To give their images authority, the artists have produced works which are technically skilful and I visually elegant. All are from larger series that are variations on a single theme and are usually intended to be displayed in specific configurations. This augmentation of the original theme does not, however, drive us closer to a resolution but makes the work even more open-ended. The mute inertia of the contrived image, combined with an intellectually cool presentation, is persuasive, but ultimately inconclusive. It is the audience's intervention and endorsement, as much as the artist's, that finally determine these works.

Christine Cornish's photographs are dark, and the viewer's reflection in the glass breaks up the continuity of the image. Because of this barrier, we linger and draw in close to study the smallest details of each photograph. The scene is the artist's invention: she has made drawing and photography converge so that centrally placed, solitary objects occupy contrived spaces. This also has the effect of creating an ambiguous sense of scale. The medium of drawing is important to Cornish, both in the initial planning for her photographs and in constructing backgrounds and simulated spaces. The basis of her work is the investigation of the real and the described subject: photography is commonly perceived as representing truth and drawing as stylized description. Cornish has aimed to ‘produce an obscurely synthesized rendering’ – a mysterious cohesion of real and unreal – by making the object and its space homogenous through the convergence of photographic detail and drawing. She asks the question, 'When, and in what way, do things exist as things?', and interprets it visually through her use of trompe- l'oeil so that it is difficult to know whether we are looking at actual objects or images altered by the artist's hand.

For the large Polaroid photographs which comprise her Words series, Fiona Hall has shaped thin metal and scraps to create mise-en-scènes with human figures that stretch and bend in exaggerated gestures. The origins of her materials are virtually unrecognizable; she cuts and moulds the metal, for example, and makes it brilliant or dull through polishing or smoking and painting. Halls interest in playing off opposing elements is encapsulated in her ability to make delicate or rich details that would otherwise be discarded. Contrasts of old and new are apparent in these photographs: the scenes are reminiscent of reliefs on ancient coins or architectural friezes but are composed from mass-produced materials and photographed to produce an instantaneous, glossy image. The inspirations for Words are linguistic. Male and female figures are posed in the configurations of individual capital letters. They in turn make up words and visual/linguistic puns. Hall has not formulated a codified alphabet as such: letters that are repeated in different words are not necessarily the same human form nor do they assume the same stance; instead they refer distinctly to each word portrayed. Letters and figures slide into each other. As in the illusion game, which depicts a duck and a rabbit together in the same form, it is impossible to see both letter and human form simultaneously: the subject is at once veiled and revealed.

X— Untitled from the Colonization of Time series by Debra Phillips is an investigation of the temporal dimensions of photography. To suggest a patina of time past and passing, she has incorporated old materials and treated surfaces. Also included is a detail of Conrad Martens's topographical painting Bridge Street, Sydney, 1839, which represents the early establishment of Australia. Time is the most important element of Phillips's work; X — Untitled is a historical palimpsest in which the layers of different eras also denote vast differences in cultural beliefs and systems. The photographic process links materials and objects that allude to the early mechanisms of technological production with the early colonial dominance of landscape and indigenous people. The detail from Bridge Street, Sydney appears in the bottom part of the work and merges into an image of rusted steel; the red-brown tones of the rust saturate the Martens city scene. In the series Colonization of Time, smoke, steam, steel and coal are motifs of industrialization. The frame is intrinsic to the concept of X — Untitled, being made of rusted steel that will continue to rust and reiterate the photographic image of rusted metal which it surrounds. The frame itself reflects the passage of time as its surface oxidizes and undergoes a process of transformation while the photograph remains static. It represents both time arrested and time passing.

Naar Het Schilder-Boeck [From The Book of Painting] by Jacky Redgate is a modern reinterpretation of Pieter Brueghel's painting Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559, which illustrates over a hundred popular sayings. Redgate has taken details of a few to produce a series of six photographs. In Brueghel's day proverbs played a vital role in speech and writing: such figures of speech were expressions of universal truths and their cryptic and metaphorical forms enhanced their wide appeal. Visually, the original work and Redgate's series are very different. Brueghel's is clear, brightly coloured, and the proverbs are represented within a single fictional landscape. In contrast, the individual images in Naar Het Schilder-Boeck are shadowy black and white photographs — softly focused close-ups that impart a claustrophobic feeling as the darkness closes in and veils them. Redgate's images are sombre and pessimistic in comparison with Brueghel's light-hearted view. The 'Schilder-Boeck' referred to in the title was a biographical compendium of Dutch and Flemish painters published by Carel van Mander in 1604. Redgate's reference to this publication is ironical as Netherlandish Proverbs is not mentioned in the text. Also, the biographical information in van Mander's passage on 'Pieter Breughel of Breughel' was not from personal acquaintance but must have been pieced together from anecdotes that had survived after the artist's death. The vagaries of those sources appeal to Redgate as they enable interpretations of her own work to be infinite and inconclusive.

The appropriation of an earlier work is also the catalyst for Jacky Redgate's sculpture Untitled 1990 from Fox Talbot Articles of china plate 3 and Articles of glass plate 4, in The pencil of Nature 1844-46. The title is long and very specific: with the information provided one can easily refer to the album The Pencil of Nature and to the two plates selected by Redgate. The artist has been faithful to Fox Talbot's photographs in her observance of scale and placement of objects. Redgate has not, however, exactly copied them: instead she has refined two images and conflated them into one. The sculpture is composed and elegant: each simple component is skilfully constructed using the proportions of the original images. By rendering two-dimensional scenes in three dimensions, Redgate has reversed the usual process of still life. This inversion has the result of reactivating historical documents so that memory becomes reality. The authority which is explicit in a photographic record is transformed and ultimately denied; it is the veracity of the glass and ceramic objects themselves, now reconstituted and revitalized, that must be considered.

The Untitled photographs by Janina Green have a modest simplicity and familiarity. She has chosen recognizable subject matter: an overflowing washing basket and a laden tea tray, familiar emblems of domesticity. Hand-colouring is used to suggest 'women's work', and refers to the traditional role of women as hand-colourists in commercial photographic studios. The tinting gives the look of old family portraits and also suggests a favourite hobby of genteel women during the nineteenth century in which they compiled photograph albums, then coloured the images and decorated the pages around them. Janina Green regards her works as a homage to women artists such as Nora Heysen and A.M.E. Bale, who painted still-life subjects and created the tradition of 'mixed bunches', a term which is descriptive of modest, casual flower arrangements and intimate domestic scenes. Green aestheticizes everyday objects and in doing so parodies the symbolic virtuosity of historical still-life painting: she has enlarged the scenes to almost mural size, thus contradicting the modesty of the subject. She wants her subjects to look as 'grave and serious as other subjects with a higher moral aura'.

Stephanie Valentin has set up stony and parched 'landscapes' for Subterranean Songs that are 'a personal response to the contemporary wasteland and a time of spiritlessness'. The photographs place the audience in the position of voyeurs hovering above and looking down upon the scenes. The vignetting and soft focus give a strange perspective, as if each view is being seen through a lens from a long distance. And that distance, because of the aged and eroded appearance of the sites, suggests the dimension of time. Valentin has found discarded objects and placed them in curious, apparently symbolic, configurations. The origins of the objects are considered and Valentin assigns new meanings that have personal relevance. The objects merge with their surroundings: occasionally it is impossible to distinguish whether details exist as objects or, as in the tower of Babel, whether they are merely emerging from the background surface. The arrangement of these scenes obviously did not take place naturally, but Valentin suggests that the significance of these objects extends beyond her intervention and is encompassed within their individual histories.

The works in this exhibition do not simply mirror aspects of the real world. They are all fabrications; carefully chosen, strategically organized and loaded with fictions and enigmas. To decipher them, the artists anticipate and solicit the participation of the audience, with its varied heritage of knowledge, assumptions and predispositions.

Kate Davidson