Exhibition Review: Visual Art | Brian Rope

counter-sites | Isabella Capezio, Aaron Claringbold & Rebecca McCauley, Matt Dunne, Nicholas Mahady, Christine McFetridge, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis

Photo Access I 7 March – 5 April 2025 

Whilst visiting this exhibition I learned that the gallery staff had received some unusual feedback about it. As I left after exploring the exhibits, I commented that I would need to spend considerable time thinking about what I had viewed. Again I learned that I was not the first visitor to make such an observation. 

I am writing this days later after doing much thinking. My “thought notes” remind me I saw various things and media that I have rarely, if ever, previously seen in any exhibition. Those things include a sign warning about the use of 1080 baits, re-felted found car glove compartments, two car seat headrest TVs, and a significant number of pieces based on reproduced text pages from a historical report. I also saw various things I’ve seen used in other exhibitions – such as a carousel slide projector, an overhead projector, speakers. And, of course, inkjet and C-type prints, digital prints on polyester film, light boxes, and laser prints. There also are Mackenzie Lee’s poetic text prints on acetate (‘These words bleed by the bite of loving teeth’ (2025)) scattered throughout the exhibition spaces on floors and walls. Plus some basalt rocks in assorted sizes. All in all it is a complex and intriguing show. Curators Karl Halliday and Madeleine Sherburn would have had an interesting task, determining which pieces to position where in the three gallery spaces – plus some pieces outside the building. 

So, what is it all about? It showcases the work of seven artists whose lens-based practices are said to “dismantle, dissect, and destabilise the complex relationship between photography and place.” The biographies and statement sheets reveal “Looking inwards to the properties of the medium itself, and outwards to the politics of vision, the exhibition extends and confuses the traditional-spatial experience of image through critical, archival, and expanded approaches to photography.” And “This entanglement with place, especially in Australia where the camera performs a complicit service in the colonial project, is problematic.” Those, and various other words, stimulate even more thinking. Some might suggest the combined complexity of the exhibits and accompanying text is too much for the casual gallery visitor. Others would take great delight in the diversity of what they see and read.

Working collaboratively as artists, Aaron Claringbold and Rebecca McCauley, try to use photography as a tool for thinking and feeling a way through “the mess of now.” They make works about how we inhabit this place; about what we bring and what we take - and the many discrepancies and spaces between.

Aaron Claringbold and Rebecca McCauley – ‘Here’s What we Know’ (2023) displaying on two car seat headrest TVs on fabricated aluminium stands at the artists eye heights.

Christine McFetridge uses photography, video and text, aiming to contest and unsettle colonial histories through an engagement with public archives – here from the National Library of Australia and State Library Victoria. 

Christine McFetridge – 'Evidence lll (2024)', archival material sourced from the National Library of Australia and State library Victoria, 29.7x42cm, laser prints, and ‘Basalt Study (Red)’ 2024, 32x40 cm, framed archival inkjet print.

Isabella Capezio’s artwork and research spiral around themes of failure, queerness and landscape. After recently completing a PhD experimenting with alternative ways to reflect on place, vision, nature and colonial power frameworks through landscape photography, they are now in the slightly existential space of figuring out what’s next.

Isabella Capezio – Upsidedown Country (2025) left, and Welcome Stranger (2025) – both unique 142 x 112 cm, c-type prints, edition 1 of 1

The arts practice of Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis is inextricably intertwined with her identity as a proud Aboriginal woman of Pitta Pitta descent. She aims to subvert and disrupt colonial approaches to image making and photography.

Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis – ‘Pitta Pitta (Published Without Permission)’ 2022, digital print on polyester film, aluminium light box, 280x280 mm, ed.1

Matt Dunne’s work explores Australia’s environment as a product of colonial legacy. Using photography and research as a basis, he develops publications, installations and education programs seeking to deepen the connection of wide-ranging and diverse audiences to the world around them.

Matt Dunne – ‘Cat taken from the wild’ (2023), inkjet on dibond, 20x25cm, ed. 1

Nicholas Mahady’s practice considers how to represent the unrepresentable, like atmospheres and energies, in the most realistic of mediums: photography. He uses poetry and language as a foundation to produce new bodies of work - treating language as a form of sculptural device, considering how one places and pairs works.

Nicholas Mahady – Left to Right: Flocked car glove compartments, size variable; ‘Glove compartment 01’ (2024-26), 62.2x78.2cm (framed), pigment print on baryta, ed. 1 of 3; ‘Suction fan’ (2024-25), 62.2x78.2 cm (framed), pigment print on baryta, ed. 1 of 3. 

 

All installation view photographs illustrating this review were supplied by Photo Access.

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