Experiments in Living [Melt], by Sammy Hawker (ACT)
Surface Appearances, by Eunie Kim (ACT)
Light Materials, by Caroline Huf (ACT)
398, by Aloisia Cudmore (ACT)
PhotoAccess Huw Davies Gallery |
Until 27 November 2021
Each year, PhotoAccess awards local and interstate artists, both emerging and established, assisting them to expand and develop their photo-media practices. They are provided with mentorship to produce solo exhibitions in the Huw Davies Gallery. The four ACT exhibitors this year were recipients of the Dark Matter, Emerging Artists Support Scheme, and Wide Angle residencies.
The works in Sammy Hawker’s Experiments in Living [Melt] encompass text, documentary video and negative prints produced in collaboration with the chemical activity of rain, hailstones, seawater and open flame. This is now familiar territory for Hawker, who challenges us to reconsider the illusion of control we hold over the natural world. These images do not disappoint.
Because we are limited, finite, beings subject to dying, vulnerability to trauma is a necessary and universal feature of our human condition. Hawker’s images speak to this, identifying the importance of nurturing our relationship to the world, and reminding us that our everyday experience is illusory, never the reality itself, of non-human forces shaping our lives.
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Tom & Pyrocumulus © Sammy Hawker |
Eunie Kim says she is grateful to have found her life’s calling in photography and is excited to see what comes next, embracing every opportunity. In Surface Appearances, Kim has used ‘Liquid Light’ photographic emulsion painted onto varied papers and brought her current Australian life into conversation with the traditional aesthetics of her Korean heritage. This is most evident in three beautiful “paintings” on sugarcane paper, looking at flowers, birds and insects.
Using materials and subjects from a contemporary Australian setting whilst simultaneously conjuring the aesthetic of traditional Korean painting, Kim explores her immigrant experience. Applying the emulsion via brushstroke, on differing thickness and texture of paper, has produced varying works. They reflect Kim’s process of learning, regretting and then correcting mistakes, and taking chances.
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Cells, captured in 2015, recreated in 2021 © Eunie Kim |
Light Materials is a series of video works deconstructing and recombining
film materials through a process of digital or analogue weaving, Caroline Huf
explores the exhaustion and re-invention of settler Australian myths about the
mystery and threat of the bush.
Huf’s work, It's No Picnic, disrupts Peter Weir’s iconic movie Picnic at Hanging Rock, a key cultural expression of early colonial anxieties in the unfamiliar Australian landscape. Each scene is pulled apart, altered in speed, scale, and moved out of time to appear as woven patterns and twills. The film’s pan pipes become an industrial sound and the threads slowly disappear, suggesting a worn-out myth.
It’s no picnic- 2021, video still © Caroline Huf
And Let’s Get Lost presents Huf’s
personal engagements with local landscapes, wearing dresses she created from
strips of 16mm film to remind us of the, often, fleeting nature of our experiences
with landscapes. The film dress unravels as she moves through the landscape
before being fed through the projector and into the gallery. Both the dress and
its experience become an ephemeral memory. Watching these works, particularly
the digital video projected onto sandstone, is a somewhat mesmerising
experience.
Aloisia Cudmore’s works span multiple mediums including photography, video, sound and installation. She investigates the notions of intimacy at the threshold between physical and virtual space.
398 comprises personal black and white digital images in which Cudmore captures intimate moments of physical proximity with her friends, family and community, during a time when travel restrictions, prohibitions on gathering and ultimately lockdowns separated us emotionally from those most important to us. These quite simple images of moments are a testament to the people that keep us connected.
4, 2021 © Aloisia Cudmore
We are fortunate to have these four
photomedia workers amongst our quality emerging and established artists in the
A.C.T. It is no surprise they were chosen to receive the awards that led to
these works.
This review was first published in the Canberra Times here. It is also on the author's own blog here.
