Curator
PAUL SNELL
Artists
JENS WALDENMAIER
GASTON BERTIN
ANTHONY CURTIS
DAVID MARTIN
RITA MAAS
SCOTT FAULKNER
PENELOPE DAVIS
Missing Presumed Dead (the loss of the referent in contemporary photography)
Date: 11-Feb-2012 – 18-Mar-2012
Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania
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 represents 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 is left to experience the work as object and the formal qualities this 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.