Photography Review | Brian Rope
The Spectral Lens | Carolyn
Craig, Damian Dillon, Clare Humphries, Roy Lee, David Manley & Justine
Roche
Photo Access | 12
September – 12 October 2024
Promotional material for this exhibition, The Spectral Lens, refers to strategies of ‘hauntology’ and the spectre. I was familiar with ‘spectre’ referring to ghosts and haunting, but what was hauntology I asked myself. Some research revealed “the philosophical concept of Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, also spectral studies, spectralities or the spectral turn) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. ……. first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. …. since been invoked in fields such as visual arts…..” So there you have it (if you were also wondering).
Curator (and exhibitor) Carolyn Craig has written a substantial essay for the exhibition catalogue, which refers to an era of multi-perspectival loss (and gain) and speaks about our bodies attempting to find a stable horizon by ingesting an overconsumption of belief via the image. We read that “the viewfinder moves into a fetishist past aligned with an almost renaissance nostalgia – while the JPEG empire consumes the single lens apparatus in an overload and discharge of normative cultural production.”
Having previously read the promotional material and the catalogue, I wondered what I was going to see – indeed whether I would even begin to understand the artworks. The answer is, as so often the case, that I will need more time to think about the imagery whilst also re-reading all the catalogue. In the meantime, I need to write some words of my own here about the exhibits.
The first pieces seen as I entered were those of Craig titled Who Gets the Rose - UV prints on Perspex, mounted on welded steel frames, with videos of slow-moving clouds looping in screens on the floor below.
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| Who Gets the Rose, 2023 © Carolyn Craig (Installation photo by Eunie Kim) |
Next, Justine Roche is showing 24 Hours (although a bio in the catalogue also refers to her series Dark Eden), comprising 24 wet plate collodions on aluminium, one on a smallish wall with the others in a long row on the adjoining long wall. They are each 12.7 x 15.2 cm, so need close inspection to see the imagery. Some are quite beautiful, whilst others are so dark as to hide their contents from my eyes.
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| 24 hours, 2020 © Justine Roche (Installation photo by Eunie Kim) |
Damian Dillon contributes 2 C-type prints of the same subject in one acrylic mount and large UV prints on white steel supported by plastic crates. Roy Lee has 2 archival inkjet prints. Clare Humphries contribution is one framed archival inkjet print. Of these various works, I was particularly impressed by Lee’s. His glorious works held my attention and drew me back to explore their detail.
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| Contemporary ruin #4, 2024 © Damian Dillon (Installation photo by Eunie Kim) |
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| History of Sky, 2022 © Roy Lee (Installation photo by Eunie Kim) |
David Manley provides something quite different. One of his works, appropriately titled Brute, is created from cardboard, cement and brick. Two are excellent inkjet prints. His final exhibit is a single channel video titled Plume, projected low down on a gallery wall, seemingly upside down – a plume of reddish dust/smoke was falling downwards whilst I was watching part of its 16:57 minutes.
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Far left: Brute, 2023 © David Manley Rear left: Plume, 2017 (single channel video) © David Manley Top right: Ekleipsis Apertura, 2024 © Clare Humphries (Installation photo by Eunie Kim) |
Each
of these six artists is highly qualified and has an impressive CV. They have a
variety of tertiary qualifications, exhibit regularly – sometimes overseas, and
have achieved successes in various Prizes. They frequently exhibit together as
a group. Some work in a number of different media. Some have been published in
journals and books. Others are represented in public collections. And, as Craig
writes in her catalogue essay, “each artist contributes to a gathering of
potential ways forward sensing and knowing via affect.”
Yes, it might be a challenging exhibition (and catalogue), but we all need to be challenged to grow as art lovers or art makers. So, I need to stop here and return to thinking about these works and re-reading the catalogue.
This review is also available on the author's blog here.