Exhibition Review: Photography | Brian Rope
Candle. Collapsar | Ioulia Panoutsopoulos
ANCA Gallery, Dickson | 9 - 27 Oct 2024
Candle. Collapsar is a series of nine new works made in the studio and on analogue film by Adelaide-born and Sydney-based artist Ioulia Panoutsopoulos, who has a Bachelor of Fine Arts, First Class Honours from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. A recipient of the John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship, she has been selected as a finalist for the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, the National Photography Prize, MAMA and Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award.
The room sheet for this exhibition starts by informing us that the works are by a contemporary artist. That is most definitely correct - the works clearly and absolutely fit into the Contemporary mould. The sheet goes on to reveal that this artist weaves together photographic, drawing and sculptural practices to embrace both the analogue and the digital realms. The artist herself tells us that, in these new works, she is pursuing synoptic connection and ambiguous movement between those realms. Why? She informs us that she is looking for an original language that pushes at the edges of photographic possibility.
I am always delighted when artists seek to push the boundaries of what is possible, whether with photography or any other art medium. That is how they (and we) grow and develop our artistic talents – or our understanding of art. To create these pieces, negatives were scanned and shown on a computer monitor, then an analogue camera was used to construct the finished product by photographing what the monitor displayed. Hotspots, screen flare, and the subtle banding pattern on the screen were embraced. Grain and the random optical texture of photographic film was overwritten, transmuted with its digital counterpart. Panoutsopoulos suggests the resulting works resemble an “open expanded pictorial nervous system.” Think about that next time you use your optical nerve to carry visual information from your eyes to your brain whilst creating a photographic artwork.
In the past, one of the main areas of focus for cognitive science was the pictorial theory of mental imagery. Proponents contended that our mechanisms which respond to perceptual inputs also reinterpret images. According to their theory, an observer not only creates an image of what someone else sees, but the perceptual system also uses the image in a bottom-up fashion. Others contend that a pictorial theory of visual perspective-taking must, at the very least, accurately depict the relative distance between various points of a scene as it would be viewed from an alternate position.
Little wonder that many of us find it difficult to define what we are looking at in images such as those in this exhibition. Are they objects, light drawings, simply marks, altered reality shapes? In my view, it simply doesn’t matter what we see, or think we do. For me, each of the artworks here are Contemporary (and I use the uppercase C deliberately) and fascinating. We can look at them for extended periods of time, finding new things of interest and continuing to imagine possibilities.
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| Installation image © Hilary Wardhaugh |
The titles of the nine works being exhibited all share the words “Packed Matter.” That, in itself, raises questions about the images. Matter is made up of very tiny particles which are so small that we cannot see them with our naked eyes. But I am not a scientist so I’ll just leave that there and allow you to think about the titles, and the things you can see in the images, for yourself. You also should obtain and read Michael Moran’s informative catalogue essay Collapsars.
Packed Matter IX, 2022 © Ioulia Panoutsopoulos, Gelatin silver hand printed photograph, 83 x 124.7cm
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| Packed Matter VI, 2022 © Ioulia Panoutsopoulos, Gelatin silver photograph, 107 x 83cm |
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| Packed Matter IV, 2019-2022 © Ioulia Panoutsopoulos |
If you are nearby and able to visit the gallery at 2pm on 27 October 2024, in addition to viewing the high-quality works in their beautiful custom steel frames (and possibly purchasing one) you can listen to an in-conversation event between the artist and David Greenhalgh, National Gallery of Australia Curator (International painting and sculpture.)
This review is also available on the author's blog here.
