Dis)Location

Define, on the two-dimensional surface of the earth, lines across which motion is to be prevented, and you have one of the key themes of history. With a closed line and the prevention of motion from outside the line to its inside, you derive the idea of property. With the same line, and the prevention of motion from inside to outside, you derive the idea of prison. With an open line (ie. A curve that does not enclose a figure) and the prevention of motion in either direction, you derive the idea of border. Properties, Prisons, borders: it is through the prevention of motion that space enters history.

(Netz 2004)iv

The Maori targeted Surveyor’s pegs and other marking mechanisms as a resistance to colonialism. They understood how the indexical line of the western gaze indentures the spaces and bodies of those gazed upon.

This ‘line’ remains etched over our landscape and bodies, demarcating capital and worth, success and failure. We move (or are forced into removal) from one designated boundary to another, measuring our capacities and desires through fences and roads, lens and data. The practices of Dillon and Craig investigate this colonized lens and how it propagates particular ways of seeing. They target the indentured ‘scape’ of the Surveyor’s lens – with material and chemical slippages to consider representational culture itself – as an extractive network meme that constructs our notion of the ‘real’. They do this using the trace – harvesting, distorting, copying, and chemically altering residues of the colonized land/lens and body to try to understand its operational protocols and to voice the deep affect that resonates under the surface of Australian culture.

For Dillon the remnant values of colonialism remain present in the value economy of suburbia where the square land dream of desire continues to scorch the landscape with fresh impetus. Within this space he also recognizes an uncanny scent of failure and death. Dillon reflects upon this Cartesian demise in his dual investigation of arterial roads and the landscapes that inhabit their edges. He sees us living on land that is both settled (as colonized space) but innately ‘unsettling’, where the Ikea dream decays within its own compromised habitationv. His practice captures the cultural affect in these uncanny spaces – ones tethered to a Lynchian dystopia of failed desire. Deconstructed homes are appropriated (via the lens) and dissected into scopic processes of knowing as property/capital. He understands that without imaging practices the western gaze is impotent in its desire to ‘own’ . Maps, surveyor marks, fences, real estate ads and the portrait format that defines our way of viewing each other – each of these function within a network economy of visual practices that inform our idea of the ‘real’ . We flounder when boundaries dissolve – and seek shelter against affect and its residual confusion. Dillon takes apart these elements, using chemical and digital processes to dissolve the abject boundary between object and subject, to confuse both the colonised subject, and the implicated viewer. This unfolds the home and its boundary (and sublime opposite) the landscape into a rhizome of new potentials: ruinous, fleeting, historical, speculative. Eroded and reconstructed it builds itself into a trace residue from the temporal occupation of man. Craig’s practice uses similar processes of repetition with differencevi to unravel the cultural screen of normalcy – within a broader practice of cultural/ biographic query into how power operates. Where Dillon’s work dissolves the boundary between property/space and self, Craig’s work is more deeply embedded in the inside of that perimeter – in how we enclose bodies and spatial economies. Her focus is within the demarcation of what constitutes value and how we extract from both the land and the body and how these forces are inextricably linked.

In works such as Mining the sublime she uses open cut mining sites as a pivot through which to investigate colonial extraction economies over both the landscape and the subject’s body. The project started through an obsession with mining images on the Internet that replicate the sublime landscape. These images use the western metaphoric trope to enact a sequence of ideological power relations over processes of viewing and consuming place. These images are appropriated and intervened with using copy-based processes to bring back bodily desire into the landscape of extraction and to slow her own consumption and distribution of images of desire. These images are returned to the materiality of mining by printing onto extracted metals such as aluminium with ink mixed with coal dust (embedding residues of man’s capital desire into the material process itself).

Her work Left behind in Lithgow extends her investigation into power and extraction more directly towards the subject – rather than the viewer. It emerged from a shared site visit with Dillon in late 2019. He was returning to a particular spot where he has photographed the same view over a number of years. Craig accompanied him to continue research in the nearby town of Lithgow – where she had been site collecting material in relation to two forms of colonised extraction (mining and a prison on site). Their research trip coincided with the bushfires of late 2019, during which Lithgow was evacuated – all except the prison population. Instead, the inmates were placed into lockdown, and issued with entry-level dust masks. This disturbed Craig and led her to consider how society devalues the bodies of the incarcerated as the detritus of society. The inmate represents what repels us. Institutionalised capital (the mainframe of society) and its fear of the Other excludes complications of deviancy, dirt, and confusion. The body of the inmate represents pure spectral terror – one outside of the fences of our protection. But the boundary lines of incarceration determine the limits of our care for those of difference in contemporary society. This dismissal of the bodies of those within the perimeter of social exclusion deeply affected the artist as a previously incarcerated person. This led her to collect film footage as they drove out of Lithgow in the deep smoke of the fire. The camera is framed through the windscreen as a viewpoint of desire – of motion un-arrested. The smoke holds itself over the car and the bodies within – like a slow suffocation. This brings to mind the boundary between pollution and cleanliness – and as access to clean air. In a world divided into capital divisions – the right to take in air – is a contingency denied to these inmates and a lesson to all lesser classes in a growing era of climate change. The second component of this work is a charcoal dust print made from ground remains from the Lithgow area fires collected during the site trip. This image is a homage to the captive nature of the lens and its historical devices to impose normalcy and deviancy over the body.

These two artists navigate the resonant historical narratives that define and inform representation and desire and give presence to the affectual residue of colonizing forces. The traces they manipulate leave a reversed shadow of their matrix as remnant as a question to what remains.

Carolyn Craig & Damian Dillon

iv Reviel Netz Barbed Wire: an ecology of modernity v Ross Gibson Seven Stories of an Australian Badland

vi These ideas reference concepts taken from Jacques Derrida

Carolyn Craig, Roadside (Remains) #3, 2020 Charcoal dust printed through silkscreen, 90 x 120 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Damian Dillon, Suburban Chrome #10, 2021 Unique C-type print from B&W negative, acrylic on alupanel, 92 x 95 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Damian Dillon, Suburban Chrome #10, 2021 Unique C-type print from B&W negative, acrylic on alupanel, 92 x 95 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Carolyn Craig, Proximal Noise: Intake Valves [still], 2020 Dual channel video performance, duration: 4:02 Edition 1/3 Courtesy of the Artist

Carolyn Craig, Left Behind in Lithgow, 2020 Charcoal powder print with twin channel video playing on screen, 110 x 90 cm (print), 4:40 (duration) Courtesy of the Artist

Carolyn Craig, Mining Subjectivities: Navigating Confusion, 2019 Screen print on aluminium embedded with coal dust, each 102 x 98 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Carolyn Craig, The Weight of Infection, 2020 Sound loop of swear word 3D printed and cast in bronze, 12 x 9 x 3 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Carolyn Craig, What Remains [studio working image], 2021 Courtesy of the Artist

Damian Dillon, About Something #2, 2021 Inkjet pigment print on Hahnemuhle on alupanel, 84.3 x 84.3 cm Courtesy of the Artist