Objectifying Elsewhere

Objectifying Elsewhere Curated by Luke Letourneau 13.08.15 - 04.09.15

Objectifying Elsewhere Curated by Luke Letourneau 13.08.15 - 04.09.15

13 August – 4 September 2015 Curated by Luke Letourneau @ 2015 authors and artists. Except in the context of research, study, criticism, or review, or as otherwise permitted by the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

Published as part of the exhibition ‘Objectifying Elsewhere’, which took place at Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude St, Fitzroy VIC 3065, 12 August – 4 September 2015.

Editors: Luke Letourneau & Sophie Moshakis Design: Chris Mark

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Objectifying Elsewhere ISBN: 978-0-646-94243-8 Subject: Art, Australian – 21st century – Exhibitions.

Other Authors/Contributors: Kate Beckingham, Brett Breedon, Emma Jenkins, Luke Letourneau, Sophie Moshakis, Alyce Neal, Vaughan O’Connor, Naomi Riddle, Lisa Sammut, Aurora Scott, Rachel Schenberg, Kai Wasikowski.

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Table of Contents 2

Introduction: A Note from SEVENTH

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Luke Letourneau After the screen: aesthetics and the hypertextual

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Aurora Scott Fast-forwarding and Re-winding

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Emma Jenkins BAD AT SPORTS

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Alyce Neal The Third Entity

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Vaughan O’Connor Two Devices after Lisa Sammut

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Naomi Riddle Eurydice’s Shadow

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Acknowledgements

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A note from SEVENTH SEVENTH Gallery is pleased to present the second Emerging Curators’ Program. This program, initiated in 2014, aims to support emerging arts professionals and artists through a mentoring framework. This year, we are delighted to present an exhibition curated by Luke Letourneau and this catalogue of dialogues surrounding the exhibition. The exhibition entitled Objectifying Elsewhere explores the notion of viewing and the objects that frame viewing and perception. This exhibition draws together five artists and five writers who explore a range of mediums that question, investigate, deliberate and subjugate notions of viewing artworks and the refracted world in, behind and beyond the works and objects themselves.

We would like to especially thank the City of Yarra who have continued to support this program and its aim to provide mentoring for the development of emerging curators. SEVENTH would also like to thank Daine Singer for her esteemed mentoring of the 2015 program. We congratulate Luke on this outstanding exhibition.

Sophie Moshakis Gallery Manager SEVENTH Gallery August, 2015

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This responsive publication of facilitated dialogues between writers and the artist’s, guided by curator Luke Letourneau frames the exhibition. It journeys through the artists minds and concepts and provides glimpses into the thought processes behind the works that will be presented at SEVENTH.

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After the screen: aesthetics and the hypertextual Luke Letourneau

You are a person, standing in a space looking at an object. The object is in collaboration with perception, its surrounding space and its own materiality.

Everything is loaded and everything is intra-related.

‘Objectifying Elsewhere’ is not an exhibition creating these links, instead it is one in dialogue with them. The exhibition acts as a point containing multiple voices, time and physical distance to deny a stasis, because everything is always in a state of becoming. You, the audience member, are one of the active agents of the space. It’s through you standing in the gallery, revelling in the confliction and conflation of multiple voices, that objects are actualised.

Space is porous. So is material, and so are you.

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Do you have clumsy hands? Well Kate Beckingham sympathises with you. Bad at sports is a series taking as its starting point videos of athletes, competing at high profile events, who watch success as it slowly falls away from their grip.

Kate Beckingham begins as a viewer. Sitting in front of a screen, the artist scrolls through lists and videos compiling athletic failure; what must be devastating moments for those depicted. Beckingham then transforms this replayed moment into a still image that is paired with an appropriation of the object denoting failure. However, these object are no longer fit for completion. They have become impossible objects. What was once functional and symbolic about the object has been removed. What was once sleek and aerodynamic is now fragile, and what was once obvious and directional is now invisible.

Where the artist sources this imagery from are spaces entertaining procrastination. While the artist does not re-present the screen as object in her work, the screen as a conceptually loaded one is still present. The screen is an object binding space, but only through your navigation. Beckingham takes an existing navigation to repurpose it and corrupt it. The artist reorganises the imagery to be placed for an audience in physical space. The artist’s work is a product of a conflated experience of space and your role as a spectator.

The agency of our objects and devices, and where we stand amongst them, has been explored by Anna McCarthy in her investigation of television’s hyphenated role in our lives: Like all technologies of “space-binding,” television poses challenges to fixed conceptions of materiality and immateriality, farness and nearness, vision and touch. It is both a thing and a conduit for electronic signals, both a piece of furniture in a room and a window to an imaged elsewhere, both a commodity and a way of looking at commodities.1

1

McCarthy, A, From Screen to Site: Television’s Material Culture, and Its Place, October, Vol.98,

2000, p.1

McCarthy’s writing is at the core of where this exhibition is positioning itself.

Objects shape immediate space. Perception, space and materiality always exist in relation to one another. Broadly, this exhibition presents objects as responses to how information transmits and transforms into new uses and values as it both converges onto new platforms, and communicates to audiences.

Lisa Sammut makes cosmic scale tangible. Images of the universe are imbedded into wooden object fabricated by the artist. These objects are then mechanised, giving them motion, as well as the capacity for tampering with light and luminosity. A naturally occurring phenomenon is imitated and made accessible.

The new moon is a piece of plywood displaying on one side a representation of our moon while on the other side it has mounted on it a mirror. The object hangs from the ceiling slowly rotating, gliding through air, and reflecting a disc of white light around the space. The moon, an object of greatness in size, both in its scale and its impact on our way of life, is made measurable. It is in no way a to scale recording of the moon, neither in size nor operation, but it behaves and processes information in a way accessible to where you stand.

Here, the moon is singular. It is just for you.

Kai Wasikowski’s Foliage is an unstable image. It is a representation of foliage constructed through a process of lenticular printing. This process creates both the illusion of depth as well as its movement. Looking at Foliage is a behavioral act. When you move, it moves. In that regard, it is similar to The new moon. However, while Sammut’s work is externally mobile Wasikowski’s is internally unfixed. With Foliage you are needed to actualize the information of the image, but our eyes cannot see it all, it cannot contain it all.

Foliage is flat, but not static. It is nonlinear, open, and without a hierarchy.

Jaishree K. Odin has discussed this fragmentation of experiences as a hypertextual one. In relation to the navigation of text on screen, Odin writes: The hypertexual medium is also composed of mobile elements; the textual body comes momentarily into existence by the spatial trajectory traced by the reader who actualizes it through situating it and temporalizing it.2 While the discussion here is directly relating to reading text and language on digital screens, it is not a stretch to reframe this discussion in relationship to objects in space. The objects contained in ‘Objectifying Elsewhere’, bind space in 2

Odin, J K, The Edge of Difference: Negotiations Between the Hypertextual and the Postcolonial, MFS

Modern Fiction Studies, Vol.43, 1997, p.603

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This artistic act is one that brings the awesomeness of the universe into your immediate space. Through the re-articulation of planets, landscapes and light, the magnitude of the universe is given an intimacy. The artist binds space and positions you amongst its plurality.

their negotiation of it, its own materiality and the viewer’s relationship to it.

They are of, and in reacting to an elsewhere.

Michael Joyce similarly frames the hypertextual directly in relationship to the negotiation of text as a visual thing: Hypertext is before anything else a visual form, a complex network of signs that presents texts and images in an order that the artist has shaped but which the viewer chooses and reshapes.3 Sensory data is disarmed in Wasikowski’s work, and how you look directly impacts what you see. The sensation of looking is not one that fixes you to a position but one that invites you to navigation.

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While Wasikowski employs a representation to make you acknowledge the symbols and codes of looking, Brett Breedon is working to remove them.

With Breedon’s work we are looking at a photograph, not a representation.

Fiddly semantics? Perhaps, but it gets to the heart of how the artist is asking you to see.

I thought I saw something is a series of photographs that have captured abstract light and shapes. To gain these images Breedon has interfered with the lens of various cameras, both analogue and digital, to capture the effect in-between this augmentation of site and object. Light reaches the artist’s lens only by filtering through these interferences. What you see as a viewer is the fragmentation of this place and materiality. You are not entering into an illusionistic space; you are negotiating a photograph as object. In this sense the artist is rearticulating the role of the photographic image. He is in dialogue with you. He presents you with an object, loaded with a history of documentary, and then re-presents nothing. But you are still a viewer, negotiating an artifact. So when this artifact refuses to communicate with you in the way you have been taught to read, what becomes of the relationship between you and your looking?

Sound is given materiality in Rachel Schenberg’s Between what I say and what I keep silent. To construct this work Schenberg has recorded voices in conversation, yet stripped it back to the mutual silences. These pauses in speech then become site specific as the sounds are played through speakers embedded in objects and played in the ‘white cube’ of SEVENTH. These conversational in-betweens reverberate in their structure and continue to augment as the gallery lives its life.

3

Joyce, M. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan

Press, 1995, p.206.

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Fast-forwarding and Re-winding

by Aurora Scott

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Kai Wasikowski

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top:

Kai Wasikowski - Foliage (interlaced) A4 proof

below:

Kai Wasikowski - Foliage depth map drawing

Kai: So cross your eyes… Give into it. Give in!

Aurora: It’s that vase-women-thing! With the women on the sides and the vase in the middle.

K: Is it coming out at you or going in?

A: Coming out…

K: Ah good you’re doing it right. Sick. And the vase is an invert?

A: Yeh, and I’m blinking and it’s still there.

K: Yeh, and you can look around it and it’s still there?

A: Yeh! K: You’ve got a whole lot of fun ahead of you now!

For a lenticular image to work the blacks and whites must perfectly line up.

The lens is a tiny plastic mountain range that zig-zags across the image — the left slope corresponds to the left eye and the right corresponds to the right. To create depth perception in a 2D image ‘valleys’ and ‘peaks’ must be nominated. A depth map is drawn out on paper and then scanned onto a computer to be converted into a white and black gradient on Photoshop.

When the depth map is merged with the photograph the image becomes a blur. It is not until the lens is applied that focal points appear — the peaks and valleys become foreground and background, respectively. Success becomes an act of translation: you have to make sure the photoshopped image, the printer and the lens are all speaking to each other. A pitch test prints out groups of black and white lines that are slightly different distances apart.

40 black lines per inch looks grey from both left and right under a 40 LPI lens? The printer is printing too wide or too small, or the paper is expanding or contracting. “It’s a lot to account for,” Kai admits. When the mountain range aligns with the valleys and the peaks, the plastic lens calibrates with the paper, a bush appears before the viewer: shiny and green and brown in full 3D. “This is what I love about using this technology — when you hit that

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Stereogram, published by HarperCollins in 1994, begins with a punchy generalisation: The human brain is the most incredible virtual-reality machine anyone has ever discovered. High pop-science (it builds an alternative evolution: brainless human discovers brain — brainless, yet, apparently, with all appropriate motor-skills still in tact.), the book offers up a Questacon brand of entertainment that Kai Wasikowski warmly extends on. “It’s not like 3D technology is cutting-edge,” he tells me as I try to get the image to appear — crossing my eyes and moving the book slowly away from my nose — somewhere in the pattern of 36 identical bouquets of flowers a heart shape is supposed to come together. “But I like the feeling that you get from 3D perception — particularly that you get in that book. I was playing with that — how it takes you by surprise when it’s constructed in front of you.”

spot when everything turns all weird and it feels like the static you get when you’re fast-forwarding and re-winding.”

Dr. C. W. Tyler’s famous auto-stereogram Heart resembles black dots of static on a white TV screen. First presented in 1979, Stereogram maintains that, “Tyler’s ingenious random-dot stereograms continue to excite the stereogram world”. I still can’t see a heart.

Foliage uses the viewer’s vision (no eye-crossing required) to create an image that exists wholly in the individual’s physical experience: “You have to use your two eyes.” Kai explains, “You can’t see it any other other way.

The body is key.” Viewing a lenticular sets a particular process in motion.

This process does not create a virtual experience, as much as Stereogram’s stoner-theorising might try to convince us otherwise. It exists in reality, in full actuality — using technology to augment the light that enters into the respondent’s eyes. Foliage manipulates our natural responses: a shiny, green and brown short-circuit.

A: I’ve always thought of what you do as a hologram, not a stereogram?

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K: It’s technically autostereoscopy, what I do… because it’s… how good are those pictures though!

A: This one needs to be a cover of an album — the one of the people, the crowd? And it moves? The album should be called Mexican Wave.

K: Ha. Yeh, that one! I think I’m going to use a crowd. To make an animation for a music video…

A: This book just gives and gives, doesn’t it?

K: It gives so much.

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BAD AT SPORTS

by Emma Jenkins

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Kate Beckingham

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Kate Beckingham - Sketch ripped from Kate Beckingham’s diary

BAD AT SPORTS / Round 1 Bad at sports traces Kate Beckingham’s response to the moment of physical failure through a series of found video stills and corresponding art objects.

Not only does she succeed in making visible the intangible moment of failure, she pushes against the boundaries of representation to question when spectatorship becomes participation. Artistic actions are destined to fail, Kate declares, because bodies are too personal to replicate; to re-enact the athlete’s failure would be inauthentic. However, the records of others’ failure flood our reality. Sixteen million views. Thumbs up. Comments disabled.

These records are not our opponents, rather a reflection of human nature.

The authenticity of an unanticipated record of failure makes the reality of the event more visible than other mimetic objects. The found images of the body failing are not interpretations, but traces; the art objects are not replicas but tangible indices, footprints, death-masks. The work is the space observed between the still and the object, where the eye becomes a ball that is offtarget and rebounding. Minolta: when you are the camera and the camera is you. Bad at sports: when you are the athlete and the athlete is a record and the record is a license to look at the feeling of failure.

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This text includes the found and altered quotes of Bobby Knight, Diane Arbus, Kate Beckingham, Luke Letourneau, Emma Jenkins, a Minolta advertisement, and Susan Sontag.

BAD AT SPORTS / Round 2

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The space that exists between the art object and the found video still reveals a site where the flat becomes inflated, where passive spectatorship becomes active identification. There is no end-point as a single frame captures a timeless pause. No hocus-pocus, just a moment of focus that encourages the endless recurrence of the failure. The found still has done what the eye cannot; it has preserved the rumblin’ bumblin’ stumblin’ moment and made it tangible. The moment of failure has been pinpointed, augmented, and transformed. It is not lost, but transferred. Failure no longer resides in the duration of a slip caught on camera. It resides in the slip of the viewer’s eye and the recollection of their own body. An object that tells of loss, of failure, does not speak of itself; it tells others of their own failure. The eye is a ball, rolling out of reach. The ghost-moment is made tangible and we cannot refute the play of bodily interaction. This precise moment of failure is absolutely unique, except for the one beside it, and the one the viewer recalls, which are all identically embodied, timelessly preserved, both recurring and static. All of this it totally up to you.

This text includes the found and altered quotes of Chris Berman, Jasper Johns, John Berger, Kate Beckingham, Murray Walker, Emma Jenkins, Susan Sontag, and Walt Frazier.

BAD AT SPORTS / Round 3 The contemporary condition has failed over and over and over again. By embracing that failure, it has turned itself into success. The athlete’s failure is Kate’s success, your success, our success. VICTORY. The temporary has been destroyed; we are caught in the endless slip from the bars, the interminable fall from the diving board, the perpetual drop of the stomach. What was unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and unanticipated has become relatable, tangible, and generative. It is not a recreation, but a translation. The eye is a ball, both in and out of the net. We may think that the primary achievement of this work is that the moment of physical failure has been captured and made tangible through a series of art objects. However, at its core is the simulated slip between one body and another, between the position of spectator and participant. This, to me, succeeds in scouting the limits of bodily capabilities more than any feat of athleticism. Bad at sports is about slipping between the imaginary body, and the body of reality; about animating the found video still and the art object, and being animated in return; about the absolute excellence of being a body at all.

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This text includes the found and altered quotes of John Berger, Kate Beckingham, Luke Letourneau, Emma Jenkins, Michael Jordan, and Roland Barthes.

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The Third Entity Alyce Neal

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Rachel Schenberg

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Rachel Schenberg - “Diffractions” from Meeting The Universe Halfway, Karen Barad, pg. 79

Transnational International Intraction Interaction Within Beyond Alongside Opposite Multiple Monolithic Spatial Temporal

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The third entity is not tangible and exists in the presence of the two other parts.

Rachel’s practice is one which strives to mute the distractions and strip the superfluous, reconfiguring the formal relationship between the artwork, viewer and space. Such an idea may seem unordinary; yet investigation posits new ideas of performance and engagement to suggest alternative methods of defining materiality and time.

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Rachel and I work at an art space together and have met numerous times to discuss ideas for this piece. Our conversations drifted around feminist theory, spatial conceptions of time and history, as well as ideas of materiality and existing outside of and within boundaries. Rachel first described her thoughts on the possibilities of entanglement between the artwork, audience and space through the work of theorist Karen Barad. Drawing on Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Rachel tells me about the possibilities of what Barad terms ‘intra-actions’. Rachel keenly explains this specifically through the ‘double slit’ experiment outlined in Barad’s book whereby particles were observed as acting like particles as well as waves, performing outside of their fixed identity.

This term ‘intra-action’ comes from Barad’s theory of Agential Realism1; interaction suggests pre-existing entities that engage with each other while intra-action removes the notion of individually constituted entities and implies a process on ongoing becoming. Barad suggests that “‘individuals’ do not pre-exist as such, but rather materialise in intra-action”.2 Intraaction questions the origin of differences and the processes by which they are determined.3 Proposing the coexistence of material entangled with one another dissolves prescribed definitions of what is – material entities or agents are not restricted to perform as defined by language.

I initially was taken aback when Rachel pulled out this thick large book on quantum physics and was not entirely sure how it related to our discussion.

Quantum physics may seem distant from art, however Barad’s theories suggest methods of inquiry that examine the very core of materiality, the materiality of the artwork, viewer and space, all overlapping and intraconnected agents.

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“Agential Theory is a theory that ultimately undermines not just the substance of matter as we

know it, but also the dichotomies between nature and culture, animal and human, female and male, even problematising the social practice of science and the nature of ethics” A Kleinman, ‘Intra-actions’, Mousse Magazine, no. 35, October 2012, p. 76.

2

Kleinman, A, ‘Intra-actions’, Mousse Magazine, no. 35, October 2012, p. 77.

3

Barad, K, Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and

Meaning, Duke University Press, 2007, p. 197.

Alyce: The role of the visitor in your practice is a role that is actively called into question, how do you view this role?

Rachel: The active role of the visitor can be used as a way to continue the work beyond its immediacy, beyond its direct affect.

I feel a work, in any artistic realm, has a capacity to extend outside of itself: to act as a disturbance within the mind, like a wave - diffracting and bouncing off other elements that consume thought. I think there is an importance to make use of this ability, and to give rise to a potentiality beyond its present reception and existence. There is a certain element, a force that can shift from the centre of the work to that in the mind of the visitor. And this is the space I am interested in accessing, triggering.

A: You discuss how forms, be it inanimate or alive, react to the presence of another. Do you feel that viewing work can be a prescribed performance?

R: I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of viewing work as a prescribed performance - the term, ‘prescribed’ somehow feels quite controlled and closed - not necessarily open to new relations between the individual agencies of the visitor and the work and space.

Therefore, what fascinates me in the realm of experiencing work in an exhibition scope, is the idea of the visitor initiating/completing/being the moment, the event, where all agencies – that of space, work and audience – converse and relate.

A: How does language provide a means to rupture notions of fixed and static ideas of objects or individuals?

R: I think what fascinates me about language is its ability to exist independent to what it represents - words can join another world, that of representation - beyond the thing itself. But when read/heard/received, the two worlds, despite having a gap, overlap - intra-act - they have a relation. I am interested in this process of understanding - between the thing itself, its signifier, and what it represents. And even more so, in poetry - where a poem can be seen as being other to the impossibility of what it replaces.

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I recognise these entities as being porous structures, which transmit within and between each other - intra-acting, overlapping and diffracting. As matter is understood in the physics world - it is described through how it behaves in relation to other matter. The relations are what hold meanings.

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Two devices after Lisa Sammut Vaughan O’Connor

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Lisa Sammut

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Lisa Sammut - We too pass the sun (Henry Chamberlain Russell’s Transit of Venus 1892, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences Research Library

Lisa Sammut’s allegorical, poetic works suggest strategies by which the viewer can navigate different scales of time and cosmic phenomena. While drone-vision, image recognition and Deep Dream offer new technological perspectives (and paranoia), Sammut’s devices draw us back to older imaging systems. Rather than nostalgia, Sammut’s interest in the history of astronomy examines human presence within an ecological and cosmic context. In offering further analysis of Sammut’s The new moon, part of Luke Letourneau’s ‘Objectifying Elsewhere’ at SEVENTH, I will examine two devices which offer an expanded readings of Sammut’s research.

In considering Sammut’s practice, there can be a difficulty in reconciling vastly different scales of time. Or more precisely, how the viewer might consider galactic time-scales while mired in the ebb and flow of sidereal time. In this respect, Michelson’s Inferferometer perhaps offers a similar navigation of time and space as to Sammut’s devices; revealing how the intake of breath might affect a wavelength of light.

1

Dawson, P, Holographic Materiality. Studies in Material Thinking. Vol. 8. 2012.

2

ibid

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Firstly, the Michelson Interferometer. Albert A. Michelson developed numerous interferometers to test various hypothesis. In essence, the Interferometer ‘causes the collimated light emitted from a single laser to be split by a tilted semi-silvered mirror and recombined—the beams being superimposed onto each other and expanded.’1 One use of the Interferometer is to determine the suitability of laboratory conditions for holographic exposures. Preeminent Australian holographer Paula Dawson provides an additional reading of the Interferometer. While the function of the device gauges the functioning of optical equipment, its sensitivity to ambient conditions, space and the observer’s presence parallels the navigation of site and materiality by contemporary artists. As Dawson notes ‘...changing weight between our feet when standing close to a table holding the Michelson Interferometer will cause the fringes to move more slowly and over a smaller distance. We can observe, over different periods of time, the effects of displacements of material things from walking, cars passing, breathing, sliding of componentry mirrors when stands are not tightened, and the movement of air currents through the beams.’ 2

The second ‘device’ offered is the Delftibactin called the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’. A mythical element (or instrument, or aggregate, it seems unclear), the intent of the Philosopher’s Stone seems dubious. Within the popular imagination, it seems to illustrate the most totalitarian aspirations of science: engineering the absolute commutability of all things. Yet, the oldest alchemical texts 3 (circa 300 BC) describe it as xerion (Arabic El Lksir; Latin elixir).4 Within this context, the xerion/elixir has a medical aspiration; a cure for human mortality and weakness.

In a contemporary context, the promise of this elixir has resurfaced. Instead of healing human frailty, it seems to promise salvation from a toxic planet.

Researchers from Adelaide University were inspired by the discovery of a peptide called Delftibactin produced by Delftia acidovorans, bacteria which lives on toxic gold ores. The bacteria changes contaminated gold from a liquid state to a solid state with a purity of 99%.5 Students ran successful tests using e-waste and Escherichia coli bacteria they modified for the production of Delftibactin.

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Unlike ancient alchemists, these young scientists are not seeking mythical substances. Instead of controlling nature, this research re-engineers the environmental toxicity caused by humans. For both Sammut and these persisting in the shadow of the Anthropocene, the naturality of the ‘natural’ world seems increasingly problematic.

My final thoughts on the intersections between Lisa Sammut’s practice and the devices mentioned previously draw me to Wikipedia’s List of Mythological Objects.6 Michelson’s Interferometer, the Deltibactin and the poetic machines of Sammut would seem at-home in this list. With a pickled hand capable of unlocking any door, numerous amulets bestowing riches and variations of the ‘fountain of youth’, these objects variously extend or stand in for bodies.

Devices compel us with their relativity to our own bodies; simultaneously analogous and incongruous. The exquisite functioning of these assemblages is best described by Deleuze & Guatarri, which I offer as an ending: In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs. 7

3

Hoffmann-Dietrich, J Looking for the Philosophers Stone.. The Third International Conference

on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections of Art, Science and Culture 4

ibid

5

ibid

6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mythological_objects

7

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F A, Thousand Plateaus. 1980

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Eurydice’s Shadow Naomi Riddle

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Brett Breedon

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top:

Brett Breedon - Process Photograph

It is said that the music that Orpheus played to the king of the underworld was so sweet that he was granted his request to bring his wife Eurydice back from the dead. There was one condition: Orpheus could walk through the underworld towards the light and Eurydice would follow behind, but if he were to turn around and look at her directly, all would be lost. Halfway through the journey Orpheus begins not to trust that his wife is following behind, he can’t hear footsteps or her breath, and so believing that he has been tricked, turns around in anger. When he does find her shadow trailing right behind him, the promise is broken. The king of the underworld was clever, knowing how easily blind faith can falter.

When we look at a photograph we tend to be like Orpheus trying to look straight ahead without turning. We want what we see to be true, to be the object of our gaze, a particular moment captured, time frozen, something to hold onto and to keep. To try and look directly within the frame and trust an image is to try not to see Eurydice’s figure lurking behind it: to ignore the process, the camera, the lens and the flash, to have the same kind of blind faith in the image itself.

In writing about NASA’s recent photographs of Pluto, Jenna Garrett finds a similar kind of clouded veil hovering between us and images beamed from light years away: “there is something between us and Pluto, aside from the vastness of space…You might see an image and believe it is ‘true’, but it isn’t necessarily the truth. Every photograph’s meaning is limited by the technology that captured it, the technology that disseminated it, and people’s ability to understand what it is they’re seeing.”1 Breedon simultaneously draws our attention to all three of these concerns. What is it we are seeing here and what is it that we know to be true?

1

Jenna Garrett, ‘What we’re really looking at when we look at Pluto’, WIRED (26.7.15)

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All photography is about different ways of seeing, about where the eye goes.

Even the camera itself has its own set of eyes and refracted gaze. Brett Breedon is interested in the shadows, on Eurydice’s side, giving us only surface and texture. We cannot truly know what it is we are seeing in these images, and as our sight and certainty becomes occluded, what is tangible is hidden behind a veil. Looking at Breedon’s photographs feels like trying to hold on to images from a half-remembered dream, those images that tend to fall away just upon waking; shapes and shadows that we can’t necessarily say are one thing or another, but seem to feel, somehow, uneasily important and significant. And they always tend to remain hazy when they come reaching up at us out of our unconscious with their true meaning eluding our grasp.

Through Breedon’s act of disrupting the eye of the camera itself, through manipulating and altering the lens, we are left with images from a machine that has altered vision and perception, technology that can’t be trusted. The result is an imprecise haze that turns our gaze outward, makes us stumble towards the object itself, rather than the image contained within it. It makes me think of all those artworks whose contents have been carefully and painstakingly concealed, think of Christo’s Packages and Wrapped Objects, what becomes more important, where does your eye go, to the unknown that lies beneath or the knotted string and paper?

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Breedon is asking the same question of photography itself – what is important here, the camera, the process or the resulting image; what is it that we see when we don’t necessarily know what it is we are looking at?

There’s a pull to the present moment, an immediacy that can only come about because of the indistinct nature of these images. There’s a move to understanding that what we are looking at perhaps isn’t the point. Instead, Breedon challenges us to shift our gaze, and what is at play here becomes as much about you looking at Breedon’s photographs as what is contained within the frame. It’s kind of that idea that in order to see clearly we must first lose part of our vision, we must be made to see that our way of looking does not give us truth or certainty, that blind faith can only get us so far – we must turn around to find Eurydice behind us.

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Acknowledgements I am not from Melbourne. So I must then first acknowledge and thank SEVENTH’s board of directors for conceiving of, and implementing the Emerging Curator Program. This program has provided access to both critical and financial guidance. I must especially thank SEVENTH’s chair, Sophie Moshakis, for being a key contact and responsive figure in the development of this exhibition. With these support systems I have found an entry point to engage, and be in dialogue with, an arts community separate from the one I know in Sydney.

I also extend deep gratitude to the City of Yarra for their fundamental financial support to this project. Without this, not only would I not have been able to allow direct dialogue between artists and writers based in both Melbourne and Sydney, I wouldn’t even be able to mount this exhibition.

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Daine Singer has been my program mentor for this exhibition. Daine has been present throughout this process and has been a figure providing intelligent and direct criticism of my curatorial practice. Similarly significant has been her guidance in negotiating the Melbourne arts community while also providing meaningful introductions to curators, artists and arts managers.

This has led me to engage in a critical dialogue with arts workers that I otherwise would have had no involvement with, or even an understaning of.

Finally, I must thank Kate Beckingham, Brett Breedon, Emma Jenkins, Alyce Neal, Vaughan O’Connor, Naomi Riddle, Lisa Sammut, Aurora Scott, Rachel Schenberg, and Kai Wasikowski. You are the writers and artists who allow this catalogue and exhibition to exist. Without our meaningful discussion and your intellect ‘Objectifying Elsewhere’ is without cause. Thank you.