Navigating Histories

Exhibition Review: Photography | Brian Rope

Navigating Histories  | Ren Gregorčič, Phuong Le, Chris Siu, Estelle Yoon

Photo Access | 2 May – 1 June 2024

Weaving together stories from the past with their present-day echoes, Navigating Histories explores themes of displacement, resilience, and identity. The artists consider individuals and communities in transition through video, installation and documentary photography.   

This curated exhibition navigates the intricate webs of geopolitical complexities and historical legacies, mirroring how communities assert their narratives in new settings or amid changing landscapes at home, continuously adapting and redefining their connections to place  

Ren Gregorčič is  an Australian-Slovenian artist. His video work, Under the Foot of Neptune, explores the artificial symbolism of a human-constructed sculpture (in Florence, Italy) which interprets the Roman sea god Neptune and his aquatic creatures. The video focuses on the floodlights that illuminate that fountain, showing them as stylised stars. The same stars are also seen in his polaroids also on display. That work plus chairs made from recycled Blackbutt timber address the relationships between materiality and power.

Under the Foot of Neptune, 2022, polaroids by Ren Gregorčič

- installation shot by Eunie Kim

Phuong Le is an emerging Vietnamese artist who uses photography to cater to his inner curiosity and reflect on his sense of self. He uses photography not only to document where he lives, but also confront his outsider status in Australia. He is constantly reminded that he is 7000 km away from his home in Vietnam, in Sunshine, a Melbourne suburb, that disguises itself as home. Sunshine incorporates installation, photography, and video to explore the suburb. The work serves as a geographic reference point to investigate the lasting impact of the Vietnam War on Australian Vietnamese migrants, including the post-war trauma and resettlement experiences they faced.

I found myself thinking of Joan Wakelin, the late British photojournalist, who I had the good fortune to get to know 40 years ago. A passionate person, her philosophy was ‘when one can laugh and cry with people, one is beginning to understand people, and only then can one begin to photograph them.’ Her photography was non-judgmental but did not hesitate to take a view. Le also has certainly taken a clear view with this work.

My home library includes Wakelin’s book The Different Drum which includes an image taken at a Transit Camp for Vietnamese boat refugees. It is of a woman who had given premature birth on a crowded refugee boat two hours prior to being rescued from that boat. Wakelin’s photographs at the closed centres for refugees were taken without permission from the authorities. Quite possibly some of Le’s family or friends spent time in that transit camp or were even photographed by Wakelin.

Having assisted Vietnamese refugees to settle in Canberra, I very much appreciated Le’s works documenting how refugees who settled in Sunshine have created new lives there. The subject matter and the intense colours convey complementary messages about the power of survival and adjustment.

Phuong Le, Untitled (from the series Sunshine), 2023

Chris Siu is a Hong Kong-born photographer who primarily works with medium-format analogue photography to explore the intricate relationships within his surrounding social landscapes, pivoting around representations of civil unrest, diasporic experience, cultural displacement, and marginality within contemporary existence.

Here he shows four imposing and high quality black and white prints. For me the most powerful image is of a cancelled passport set against the front page of a newspaper with its story about the transfer of Hong Kong back to China in 1997. I hope Siu is familiar with Hedda Morrison’s wonderful images of Hong Kong, published in a book by Edward Stokes which also is in my library.

Expired Passport by Chris Siu

  

Estelle Yoon is a queer, Korean-Australian visual artist. Her Prussian blue 16mm film video work 쎄쎄쎄 (sse-sse-sse) is a poetic homage to inter-generational love. It weaves a cultural tapestry, harmonising the South Korean traditional lullaby 반달 (ban-dal) and its hand gestures to nurture deep familial bonds in their most simple form.

Estelle Yoon, 쎄쎄쎄 (sse-sse-sse) (film still), 2023

I arrived in Australia as a migrant with my parents and brother after a five week’s ship voyage from England as an 8-year-old. We had to make considerable adjustments and adapt to an entirely new lifestyle in a very different place. This exhibition caused me to revisit my experiences.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.

Photography - Bushranger Blue by Rory King (Canberra)

Photography Review by Brian Rope

Bushranger Blue | Rory King

M16 Artspace | 9 June to 2 July

Rory King is a Canberra-based artist, whose work sits between documentary practice and personal narrative fleshed out through visual discourse. He is interested in unseen personalities living on the fringes of society and the tensions between nostalgia, melancholia, and the sublime. 

King received the National Gallery of Australia Summer Art Scholarship for photography in 2011, graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in Photomedia at National Art School in 2017, and was named one of the up-and-coming artists of 2018 by Vogue Australia. In 2022 he published his debut monograph Plumwood. He was recently awarded a Full Merit Scholarship by Charcoal Book Club to attend the 2023 Chico Hot Springs Portfolio Review in Montana, USA.

During his early career, King has been in various solo and group exhibitions, including at PhotoAccess (2018), Nishi Gallery (2019) and the Australian Photography Awards 'STORIES' Exhibition (2020).

An ongoing project, Bushranger Blue looks at those who live ‘outside the law.’ We know such outlaws as bushrangers, considering them to be both heroes and villains, champions of freedom who turned to violence and thievery to balance the scales. Bushrangers lived on the periphery of society, in the harsh countryside and outback.

What started as an investigation into these Australian outlaws quickly became a more personal exploration of isolation and grief. King travelled Australia in search of the spirit of these long lost, but far from forgotten men. In deserts, bush and mining towns, he tried to reconcile his own feelings and emotional responses to those remote and energised places. Living on the road for weeks, he began to imagine the isolation, silence, and spaciousness the outlawed convicts must have felt being exiled from regular life and needing to survive by any means possible.

The created imagery displayed in this exhibition does not paint an accurate narrative of the history of the Australian bushranger. Instead it explores loneliness, death, and longing. It reveals some of the isolation still experienced today in the more remote regions. The images speak of a yearning for deep connection in the face of isolation.

Twelve of the works are simply titled Bushranger #1 to #12. #2 is of a dog being washed in a wheelbarrow. #4 is of a dead tree root in which I see a face.

Rory King, Bushranger #4, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist

 #5 shows a man who looked to be gutting a ‘roo – a little research gave me the information “A man skins a roadkill kangaroo in a field of native wallaby grass for its pelt and meat. In the depths of the outback, self-reliance and industriousness is foundational.” #10 is of a hugging couple – more research provided additional information “a couple lovingly embrace after being separated during the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

A few works have titles that precisely describe the contents - Dog Tooth is one.

Rory King, Dog Tooth, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist

Nightscar shouted art to me but did not reveal a scar to my eyes. S.D. is an image of a rather forlorn looking man – his initials? Self portrait #2 shows, for me, a person who could well be a modern-day bushranger.

Rory King, Self portrait #2 , 2021. Image courtesy of the artist

I can’t conclude without mentioning Growling Swallet. Do you know what that means? A swallet is an underground stream or river. At the place where it goes beneath the surface it makes a loud “growling” noise when the water is running hard.

The exhibition is hung in the corridor space known as Gallery 3 – not, in my view, always the best place to show or to view sets of artworks. Because of the subject matters and loneliness/isolation themes the space works quite well here. The black and white images are smallish, some just 20.3 x 24.5 cm. There are pigment prints on Canson platine fibre rag and toned silver-gelatin prints. And there is a delightful handmade monograph in a Tasmanian oak case that is well worth exploring.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.