Light Moves
Group Exhibition
Light Moves:
Everyone Has A Story
Ballieu Library, The University of Melbourne
2007
The works in this exhibition are a culmination of studies undertaken in the subject ‘Light Moves,’ within the final year of the Bachelor of Creative Arts programme. The subject examined the way that artists and photographers use and control light to create atmosphere. Each student planned, undertook a research project based on light and presented a selection of their final pieces for public scrutiny in the form of a curated exhibition. They were encouraged to explore challenging lighting situations and conceptual ideas, including how photographers manipulate dynamic zones to create pre-visualised effects. This exhibition prompted dialogue between aesthetics, science and technology.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Texture and line are the principal aesthetic qualities I emphasise in this series. I experimented with artistic materials that would lend tonal gradations and detail, including pen, pencil, crayons and pastel. The images were drawn onto paper and then photocopied onto overhead transparencies. The transparencies were then exposed and processed in the darkroom, with an aperture of 8 and a filter of 4 ½ to achieve a stark black and white contrast. The photographic technique is known as ‘photogram’, which capitalises upon both the science and the arts. It is often used as a means of artistic expression to produce a wide variety of designs and imagery that are often surreal.
The series centres upon the theme of ‘superfictions’ – fictional identities, and Indian familial and domestic culture. I invite people to view the images as a visual documentary, which like photographs, validates the life of a person. The process of creating a ‘photo’ without a camera, yet attempting to create a ‘truthful’ rendition of an event or scene, questions the accuracy of memory, observation and the medium itself.
Typically, the camera is the only art practice that is concerned with capturing the moment – here, the eye and memory functions as a recording tool and the processing technique as the objective element. The metaphor of ‘writing’ your own memories, surface identity and the exploration of the individual through the representation of everyday lived experience - are subjective as the nature of the represented medium itself.
Although not working in the same medium, in terms of conceptual content, Mary Schepisi has been an inspiration as she explores fictional identities in her paintings and drawings. A number of 20th Century photographers employed the use of photograms - method is perhaps most prominently attributed to Man Ray and his exploration of rayographs. Others who have experimented with the technique and that I had researched include László Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad (who called them "Schadographs").
GALLERY
