Artists’ Statements
Kitsch and Cliché
Anke Staker
I am interested in the nature of memory and its relationship to
photography, both distinguished by their shifting boundaries between
reality and imagination. My work examines expressions of the conscious
and subconscious mind, desire, nostalgia, fantasy, knowledge, creativity.
This links my past and present photographic projects ranging from erotic
portraits, performative self-portraiture and photo fiction to urban
landscapes and table top tableaux.
For my present project I create miniature scenarios with dolls and
fabricated or found objects, like small stage settings, theatrically lit which I
then photograph. These constructions are informed by memories of
childhood, mixed with stories told by adults and later obtained impressions
from literature, movies, travel and from living in Australia.
It starts with a snippet of memory from growing up in Hamburg, Germany
after WWII , for example the garden of my grandmother from a time when
I was very little or the thick layers of autumn leaves I liked to play in, or a
Nissenhut camp for refugees in our neighbourhood. The basic ingredients
for the settings are conceived in advance, however, during the process of
photographing, details are added or taken away quite intuitively.
My interest in this is not only the production of the images as an end result,
but also the process of artistic creation itself, comparative to the intuitive
writings practiced by the Surrealists in France in the first part of the 20th
Century. By letting myself submerge into this process, visions and and
unexpected memories arise associated to the previously conceived
scene.
Catherine Cloran
I had been wanting an excuse to make a plastic still life for some time.
When I first moved to Asia I started collecting bright, shiny examples of
‘plastic nature’ or ‘fake nature’ to photograph. I also collected plastic
objects that washed up on the beaches of Hong Kong. I have had a
love/hate relationship with plastic ever since. In this work I wanted to
retain that ambivalence and ambiguity about what is beautiful and what
is kitsch. I’m interested in treading the fine line. I also wanted to play with
ideas of transience and permanence so I looked to 17th Century Dutch
Still Life painting. As well as being a chance for artists to show off their skills,
these paintings celebrated nature and the sensual enjoyment of food, but
also warned against the dangers of vanity and excess. They were
reminders that nature is ephemeral and that nothing lasts forever.
My still life, being plastic, could actually last forever; but in this age of
environmental decline, this is a ghastly thought and therefore becomes a
sort of warning for our times.
Caroline Foldes
Everything is sacred. I endeavour to capture and demonstrate this
concept through my work. In my idyllic, escapist fantasies, everything is
beautiful and wondrous. In my photographs, I frame the world so that this
dream comes true. I hope to show everything I encounter in its most
attractive aspect – the magic in our everyday lives. All of my work focuses
on photographing and sharing the simple wonders all around us - a
celebration of the elements of light and shadow encountering and
enveloping form. Through my landscape work, I hope to take the
audience on a journey into the realm of emotion and instinct. I invite the
audience to respond intuitively, allowing their own fantasies and idylls to
permeate my images with totally individual associations and meanings.
‘So sweet a place’ is a landscape idyll. Is it a cliché? Is it kitsch? Or does it
remind us of the possibility of pure, universal beauty? There is so much
splendour revealed when we simply allow the world to be as it is and
notice it.
Digby Duncan
Digby Duncan was a documentary filmmaker and film producer for 25
years before turning to photography. She was an active independent
filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, making and promoting short films
and social action documentaries at a time when they were rarely made
or seen and when women were fighting for their place in the emerging
Australian film industry. Digby's photographic work since 2003 has ranged from macro textual
images of seaweed patterns to desert landscapes. Her portrait
photography has been featured in Art Monthly and MCA publications. More recently Digby has been exploring the impressionistic possibilities of
night photography. Her most recent exhibition “After Dark” at Syndicate
at Danks Gallery brought her full circle to her camera work as a
documentary filmmaker.
Ella Dreyfus
In Kitsch and Cliché, at NG Gallery in 2012, Ella is exhibiting a self-portrait
made at her one- night exhibition The End of the Bloody Reds at the Red
Rattler Theatre in Sydney in 2010. This exhibition was a celebration of
Menopause and featured an installation of hundreds of red objects from
Ella’s personal collection, which were given away to her red-dressed
guests.
Garry Trinh
I'm inspired by photographs that create a smile in the mind. That "ah-ha"
moment of instant recognition that something extraordinary has just
accrued and then captured with minimum preparation and fuss by a
photographer. I believe these photos of tiny cracks in our reality have
the potential to change the way we see everything.
Jenny Templin
Still passionate about my profession after 30 years, I love the opportunity a
camera provides to capture “magic moments” and to document the
world around me. Whether undertaking a broad range of commissions for
corporate and private clients (from taking portraits of 6,000 ABC staff
nationwide to working as official photographer for the Dalai Lama),
exploring the diversity and colour of India for decades or continuing a
long term personal project to document the changing face of Sydney
(including the restoration of the QVB, the transformation of Darling
Harbour, Pyrmont, Walsh Bay and now Barangaroo), my camera is a
passport to my world.
Jethro Cunningham
Death & Illness, is the suburban stroll from 911 Mission Street to the
University of California, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA. A space where
the sameness an individual encounters transforms into a backdrop of pure
banality, where even the most insignificant events and peculiarities may
take the spotlight in the perfect chaos of suburbia. This space, with its
repetitious, yet transient moments is the inspiration behind Jethro
Cunninghams’ most recent photographic work.
Death & Illness, is a large-scale collection of high contrast black & white
photographs depicting white picket fences. This photographic work has
been composed digitally to create a seemingly endless strip of suburban
dreams and family ideals along with notions of prosperity and security.
Although all the photographs are strikingly similar, each house is the home
of a different and varied group of unknown individuals. It is the title of the
work, however, that is of the most significance. In Feng Shui the white
picket fence, surprisingly represents Death & Illness, thus trapping most
suburban households within the confines of ill-health and death.
Judith Ahern
Statement about the work: the image the ‘ Big shell’ is from a series
documenting the social and natural landscape of Noosa. The big shell is
of a popular local tourist attraction, in the iconic tourist resort town of
Noosa. The big shell encapsulates the image of the popular ‘big’ tourist
drawcard (big pineapple, big banana etc.) in the kitsch and fading
façade of a shell shop in the back streets of Tewantin.
Ken Lipworth
As my photography has developed I have become increasingly
interested in trying to express the everyday mundane as something more
interesting and inviting.
For this portrait, I explored combining a relatively clinical image of an
extracted tooth with the image of an attractive face, finding and
combining the common areas of form and luminosity in both images and
marrying them to produce the final image. I also thought it worthwhile to
add a little humour.
When producing images, I strive to look beyond the superficial and to
explore objects and subjects with a more open mind – a process that
often reveals one or more alternative views of what, at first, seems like a
very ordinary subject.
Lynn Daryl Smith
The city is the exoskeleton of a community. And, although most of us live
and work in buildings not of our own choosing that were designed and
built by corporations or government bodies, we paint, attach signs to,
write on, add structures to and carve out chunks from these buildings. In
so doing we transform the city into a spectacle that’s the product of a
collective.
I shoot on the streets and in the back lanes of Sydney and Melbourne at
night without people. My aim is to reveal, through traces left on urban
structures, the feelings of people not present: their hopes, desires, joys,
fears, loneliness and pain.
Waving Santa is from the series entitled Longing and the City, a solo show
presented at the MRA Gallery, Alexandria, November/Dec ember 2011.
Marie Ramos
This image is 1 of 50 photographs featured in a private Charity exhibition
for Hands Across the Water in 2010. As a baby portrait photographer there
is a special connection between words and images and "Heartful" is a
beautiful example of this. Marnya Rothe
Cut Out is the result of my Photomedia Masters thesis. The photographs
evolved from my research and immersion into a combination of fashion
photography, surrealism and feminist theory.
Characterised by a frolicsome take on feminism, fashion photography
and notions of the male gaze, the works in this exhibition also take
inspiration from the photographic and ideological styles of Guy Bourdin,
Helmut Newton and the Varga girls.
The women in the photographs are literally 2D objects cut-outs from my
original photographs re-photographed. These cut-outs are then trapped
into a domestic diorama, creating a dialogue between the surrounding
objects and the female subjects. The women have two choices – they
either surrender to the role given to them by the object, or sexually
overpower them.
My passionate sense of vintage fashion will be evident in these
photographs, however for the viewer the relationship between the
woman and the object may be what entrances.
Michael Coridore
Paul Capsis as his grandmother, Angela.
This is a portrait of Paul Capsis as his grandmother Angela. I never thought
that this portrait would open up a suitcase of memories of family for me.
Paul and I share a common heritage, both of our mothers and
grandmothers were immigrants from Malta. Their frailty, naivete and
insecurity of their experience as new immigrants in such a foreign land
came flooding back during the portrait sitting.
Peter Solness
In January 2009 I walked into the Sydney bushland at night with camera,
tripod and torch in hand, looking for something beautiful to photograph. I
had been living interstate for several years and so what I was hoping to
find was a sense of reconnection to this city where I was born. Since an
early age the Australian landscape has been a source of constant
fascination for me and it has played a major role in defining my sense of
identity.
What began as a tentative foray into a difficult and at times
disorientating environment, quickly became a revelation. In the same way
that our eyes adjust to the dark if we avoid bright lights, so my
ever-increasing familiarity and understanding of the bush at night
enabled me to 'see' in new ways, via my digital camera. By working at
night using only hand torches as my light source, I was able to reduce the
'flood' of light that inundates camera lenses during the day. I began to
work from a 'black canvas' and the freedom that gave - to be able to
apply light to the landscape in carefully considered and even playful
ways - was very liberating. This photo was particularly ambitious as I had to
hand-light the entire waterfall and its surrounds. The process was
time-consuming (4 hours to complete the lighting of the scene) slippery
and dangerous, I was also attacked by sandflies and almost trod on a
startled blue crayfish.
The technique of 'painting with light' as I describe it here is nothing new to
those who practice the profession of photography. What is new is that I
had begun taking the technique into different territory. In a sense I had
reinvented it to suit a specific outcome. The images I sought to produce
were narrative-driven rather than technique-driven. I wasn't trying to
show-off my skills as a photographer, I was trying to elicit something which
was deeply felt and personal. To do that I was drawn to try
experimentation and innovation.
What followed was a surge of creative expression. I often relied on
moonlight to show the way and hence the moon became a constant
companion. I even began to employ the moon as a source of light in my
images wherever possible." Peter Solness 2011
Richard Morecroft
The question is always “What has led to what we are seeing - these
patterns, this place, these objects, these choices?”. Patterns of behaviour
come from repeated choices; physical patterns from repeated processes.
Both kitsch and cliché carry with them an association of – at some time –
popular choice; something chosen repeatedly. Yet kitsch and cliché carry
negative associations too – others have decided to reject or deride those
choices.
In some countries where motorbikes and scooters are very popular forms
of transport, the fabric and pattern of the seat is a statement of fashion
and perhaps of status. The patterns often hark back to the natural world,
even in the midst of an intensely human cultural environment.
“Transported”, reflects the cliché that the (often decidedly kitsch)
patterned scooter seats have become and invites consideration of the
long trail of choices that has resulted in the evolution of these objects.
Samantha Everton
There’s always a sense of drama about photo-artist Samantha Everton’s
exhibitions, and Vintage Dolls, doesn’t disappoint. Featuring a total of 12
works, the images capture a series of surreal adult-themed moments
expressed from a child’s fantastical perspective; from eras of a time gone
by to cultural, racial and social differences.
“I was inspired by the innocent act of children playing dress ups and the
way they re-enact adult behaviour, concepts and themes, without
preconceptions or judgement,” Samantha Everton says.
In Vintage Dolls, the images give physical reality to a child’s fantasy of
adult life and discussion. “I wanted to present a child’s perspective about
adult subject matter, particularly race and culture, much of which came
about because of the personal discovery of my own upbringing in a
multicultural family,” she adds.
While the pictures suggest a chance encounter between camera and
the moment captured, the reality comes together because of the
intricate choreography of imaginative concept, lighting, mood, costume,
setting and artist/s. Samantha spends endless days and months gathering
all the elements needed to create these theatrical works; from finding a
decrepit house that she could manipulate and semi-demolish, to
costumes and props, to a living tree and a friends black cat.
Stephen Dupont
I chose to make a statement about the human condition of war on a US
Marine Platoon in Afghanistan. I spent one month in the volatile province
of Helmand with Weapons Platoon. I made a series of Polaroid portraits
and attached them inside my journal. Each member of the platoon was
asked to write something along side their picture to the question, "Why am
I a Marine?" My aim was to offer a small window into the psyche of young American Marines serving in Afghanistan that might also say
something personal and honest about not just themselves but the war as
well. The image here is a raw scan of of my original diary pages with no
alterations or manipulation taken and made in August 2009.
Tanya Lake
It is hard to live in Sydney and not be seduced by the beautiful ocean
surrounding us. For years I have found myself floating out at sea, after
work, or on a lazy weekend trying to capture the beautiful dreamy
"oceanic zeitgeist". This image was one of 12 from a series titled "Sydney's
waterways" which was represented at the World Press Awards in 2004 in
the environment category. I love photographs that don't necessarily look
like photographs. Images with blur, that can look like paintings, that
capture a mood rather than a textbook correct exposure. These are my
favourites. “The inspiration for my photography are the Ocean and Beaches of
the South Pacific. I try to find a visual connection within my coastal
community and express the beauty of my immediate environment
using and abstracting traditional photographic means.” – Tim Hixson