Jo Scicluna would like to thank –
List of works –
When Our Horizons Meet, 2013
Where A Circle Meets A Line, 2013
Where I Have Always Been (An Island)
(Diptych), 2012
Where I Have Never Been, 2013
Where Nothing Else Matters, 2013
Where Nothing Is Everything, 2013
Where The End Meets The Beginning, 2013
Luminous Circle I, 2013
vinyl on glass door
Luminous Circle II, 2013
acrylic
Luminous Circle III, 2013
vinyl on glass window
Where Nothing Is Everything (Moving Still)
2013, Single Channel DVD, duration 3:16
glass window and vinyl
Dr Karen Burns, Danica Chappell, Renaee
Churches, Ross Coulter, Christo Crocker, Beau
Emmett, Alex Harvey, Peter Hatzipavlis, Katie
Lee, Catherine Martin, Paul and Lola Morgan,
The Morgan Family, Michael Quinlan, Kirsten
Rann, Geoff Robinson, Doris and Mark
Scicluna, Vivian Cooper Smith, Linda Tegg,
Meredith Turnbull, Manon Van Kouswijk,
Greg Wood, Stephen Zagala and all at The
Centre for Contemporary Photography.
Catalogue Design: Jo Scicluna & Vivian
Cooper Smith at The Single Desk
Where There Is No Where, 2013
Where Tomorrow Meets Today, 2013
Where Two Horizons Meet, 2013
Supported by a City of Yarra
Small Project Grant.
Where Two Oceans Meet (Diptych), 2013
Where We Will Always Be, 2013
All framed works comprise some or all of
the following media: archival pigment ink on
cotton rag, acrylic, Victorian Ash timber.
Editions of 5.
Jo Scicluna When Our Horizons Meet
03 APRIL — 19 MAY 2013
404 George Street
Fitzroy VIC 3065 Australia
T +613 9417 1549
E [email protected]
www.ccp.org.au
Cover Image –
Where I Have Always Been (An Island)
2012 (detail)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical (including photocopying,
recording or any information retrieval system) without
permission from the publisher.
© Centre for Contemporary Photography 2013
and the artist.
ISBN 978-0-9872933-6-7
Centre for Contemporary Photography is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria and is assisted
by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding and advisory body. Centre for
Contemporary Photography is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, state and
territory governments. CCP is a member of CAOs Contemporary Arts Organisations of Australia.
In Memory of Lawrence Scicluna
Looking at Jo Scicluna’s work I find a
methodology of contrasts, pairs and doubles;
the curve against the orthogonal, horizon
against ground, a photographed landscape
and its replacement, the solid surfaces of art
works placed beside the gaps of doors and
windows. These couplings are handled with
precise consideration and surprisingly, these
reserved works exert powerful effects on the
beholder. Scicluna’s art circles around enigmas
and puzzles, producing fascination and a
desire to return to the work, to seek out and
understand its strangeness.
How does she achieve this? Although
“landscape” features in a number of the
images, places are deliberately chosen as
generic terrain. But in emptying the image of
certain kinds of landscape content, Scicluna
replaces the “view” with other considerations.
By working with strong aesthetic interventions
– tonal contrast, the suppression of individual
detail through monochrome photography,
the dominance of the line – Scicluna makes
landscape a vehicle for the tension of
opposites and twins.
The titles of her photographs and
constructions echo with the moment of the
double; Where I Have Always Been (An
Island), Where Two Horizons Meet, Where
Two Oceans Meet, Where A Circle Meets
A Line. Some of these sentence titles are
paradoxes: something that cannot be resolved.
Other captions are formed from duplicates,
the doubling of horizon lines or oceans, and
other titles bring binary elements into a single
space. I keep looking at the works, trying to
discover how difference has been held in place.
The double is a favourite device of Gothic
literature, reflecting a divided self, or desires
that cannot be openly discussed. Scicluna
is frank about her own displacements and
unease in Australian space as a first generation
migrant. Whilst the work can be read
allegorically for biographical content, the
pieces expand and resonate because they
encompass life story, formal exploration
and material investigations into the nature
of viewing.
Relations between the visible and invisible
underpin any work of art. The two categories
might become the subject of an artwork, but a
persistent question is: how has this piece been
made? Sometimes the work’s manufacture has
been concealed – famously, arguably, in realist
painting – and Scicluna sometimes picks at this
element of disguise and revelation. When she
places a disc of photographic paper covered
with an image of landscape a few millimeters
above the landscape image she conceals, I see
the edge of the substitute view and the shadow
cast by the disc. I’d like to smooth the paper
out or pull the disc up and peer beneath its
surface. I want to close the gap, but the gap
is the work.
Dr Karen Burns