Visual Art Exhibition Review | Brian Rope
VIEW 2025
I Cailyn Forrest, Adam Hsieh, Fiona Lee, Aia Solis, Emma Winkler
VIEW 2025 shares artworks by emerging artists Cailyn Forrest, Adam Hsieh, Fiona Lee, Aia Solis, and Emma Lyn Winkler. It is accompanied by a publication offering insights into current photographic trends.
Cailyn Forrest is a Doctoral candidate in her final year at the National Art School, Sydney. Her practice focusses on examining analogue and alternative photographic processes through a feminist lens.
In her work Darkroom Viscera here, Forrest has transformed the act of photography into a bodily ritual, intertwining artist and material. The results are, in effect, a performance. They show us a female body, but it is not portrayed in a conventional manner. Rather the set of ten seemingly faded prints successfully present the artist’s body very differently. The artist has described them as “little experiments.” An experiment is generally considered to be a careful test used to discover or understand something that is not known. So, it is interesting to look at this series and consider how well Forrest’s experiments, whether little or more substantial, have improved our understanding of the female body.
Cailyn Forrest is a Doctoral candidate in her final year at the National Art School, Sydney. Her practice focusses on examining analogue and alternative photographic processes through a feminist lens.
In her work Darkroom Viscera here, Forrest has transformed the act of photography into a bodily ritual, intertwining artist and material. The results are, in effect, a performance. They show us a female body, but it is not portrayed in a conventional manner. Rather the set of ten seemingly faded prints successfully present the artist’s body very differently. The artist has described them as “little experiments.” An experiment is generally considered to be a careful test used to discover or understand something that is not known. So, it is interesting to look at this series and consider how well Forrest’s experiments, whether little or more substantial, have improved our understanding of the female body.
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| 16122024, 2024 - Silver gelatin print on hand-coated rice paper on board – Cailyn Forrest |
Adam Hsieh is a digital artist. Guided by his experience as a queer Chinese migrant, Hsieh’s art practice seeks to explore the dynamic tension between places and place-makers. He uses multi-sensory interventions, manipulating systems of light, sound, moving images, code, and AI.
In I Didn’t Come Here for Love here Hsieh has used juxtaposition – wide-angle views of Hobart’s Mount Wellington alongside exchanges had with others on the geosocial app Grindr. Words from those encounters are superimposed on the well-chosen views of the famous mountain. The resultant video installation runs for 10 minutes showing limited movements in each channel as it screens.
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| I didn’t come here for love, 2023 - feature image from three-channel video installation – Adam Hsieh |
In her Future Critical artwork here she seeks to confront ecological loss and political inertia, arising from the experience of losing her home in the 2019–2020 bushfires. Using an inkjet print of video stills, a clock and audio, this work explores the lack of necessary action by political systems through visual disruptions, layering, and fragmented imagery. Their portrayed remnants speak to us of the destruction of our precious forests, reminding us of the terrible impacts the fires had on the natural environment.
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| VIEW round - inkjet print of video stills – Fiona Lee |
In her work Taranta Muna, Solis merges past memories and present realities, using some quite delightful stitching on photo collage plus video. On her Instagram account she has written that this is “an ongoing project that reflects the unspoken dissonance of not fully belonging to the past or being entirely rooted in the present - a state of instability and uncertainty. Threads weave together images of past memories and present realities, creating a layered dialogue between control and chaos, seeking strength not in resolution, but in embracing the uncertainty of the in-between.”
These works were some of my favourites in the exhibition and I look forward to seeing more of this project as it evolves.
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| 01 - stitching on photo collage - Aia Solis |
The exhibition catalogue informs us that, in Shadow Puppets, Winkler fuses painting, photography, and animation into textured narratives infused with “existential absurdity.” I had to do some web browsing about that term, learning (amongst other things) that it underscores the conflict between our desire for order and the chaotic nature of the universe. Certainly, Winkler’s paintings (including a hand-painted stop-motion animation) here are fascinating combinations of diverse things wherein the end compositions to my eyes seemed appropriate.
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| Sinking Feeling, 2023, oil, acrylic and spray paint - Emma Winkler |
This review is also available on the author's blog here.
