Curator

PAUL SNELL

Artists

JENS WALDENMAIER

DAVID MARTIN

SCOTT FAULKNER

GASTON BERTIN

PENELOPE DAVIS

ANTHONY CURTIS

RITA MAAS

Date: 01-Feb-2012 – 23-Oct-2013

TOURING LOCATIONS: CONTEMPORARY ART TASMANIA GALLERY, CALOUNDRA REGIONAL GALLERY, BUNBURY REGIONAL GALLERY, GERALDTON REGIONAL GALLERY

The exhibition Missing presumed Dead (the loss of the referent in contemporary photography) focuses on the complex but intriguing relationship between realism and abstraction in contemporary photography.

CURATOR’S STATEMENT:
Some of the most interesting work being produced at the moment is by artists who shift the perceptual paradigms and question the mechanisms of observation. Rather than transporting reality they are creating it. The artists represented continue to build on a language that exists somewhere between photography and painting. The aesthetic is as important, if not more important than the process.

Missing presumed Dead will represent work that first and foremost can be appreciated for its abstract, formal qualities, such as form, colour and composition. The work may be derived from constructed images or from the manipulation of process whether concrete of digital. Some may arrive at forms of abstraction through the specific use of framing when recording a subject, while others might go much further so that a direct identification with the subject becomes ever more difficult or impossible. The viewer will be left to experience the work as object and the formal qualities it brings.

Central to all the selected work is the idea that these images exist in varying degrees as self-referential objects. What the work loses in representation it gains in pictorial power, free and autonomous from representational limitations.

ARTICLES