- Roy Ananda
- Natasha Bieniek
- Dale Cox
- Sebastian Di Mauro
- Daniel Dorall
- Marian Drew
- Vincent Fantauzzo
- Juan Ford
- Neil Haddon
- Matthew Hunt
- Louisa Jenkinson
- Donna Marcus
- Harry Nankin
- Shaun O'Connor
- Helen Pynor
- Reko Rennie
- Victoria Reichelt
- Natalie Ryan
- Charles Robb
- Yhonnie Scarce
- Roh Singh
- Ken Yonetani
Harry Nankin
Harry Nankin is renowned for creating the first large-scale outdoor plein air shadowgrams of living ecosystems in the history of photography in 1993. Since then he made shadowgrams of the sea (The Wave, 1996-2002), the Mallee woodland (Contact, 2003-05) and of precipitation falling in Tasmanian rainforests (The Rain, 04-6). A second strand of Nankin's practice attends to history and Holocaust. In 1994 he made a pilgrimage to Poland. The outcome of this visit was a beautiful and poignant homage to the land of his forebears and the disappearance of the rich cultural presence of European Jewry called Craters of the Moon (1998-2002). Harry Nankin has been the recipient of Arts Victoria and Australia Council grants and his works have been acquired by a number of institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Jewish Museum of Australia, the State Library of Victoria and Monash Gallery of Art.
Exhibitions
Syzygy - 2010
Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee once served as an indigenous celestial observatory. The heavens reflected in its shallow waters informed a sacred reciprocity of sky with country, a reciprocity today and forever ruptured. The Syzygy project of which this work is a part reflects 'photo-poetically' upon this sacrament and its loss by approaching the now dry lakebed as a focal plane upon which photographic materials are exposed directly without a camera to the ambient starlight of night. Each resulting triptych juxtaposes the star shadows of live native invertebrates found around the lake or the imprint of women dancers footfall on the lakebed and a rare astronomical glass plate. The arduous insect collecting, dance choreography and star exposure process, the kinetic touch of creatures, flesh and object recorded on the imaging surfaces and the photochemical punctum of ancient cosmic light imprinting the exquisitely detailed final capture articulate an indexical physical reciprocity with the site and stars, a reciprocity emblematic of what our cultural relationship with nature is not.
The Rain - 2007
The Rain is a sequence of photographic artworks recording precipitation in and around unprotected relict temperate rainforest sites in Tasmania at life-scale. The works are outdoor 'shadowgrams': shadow images cast by living vegetation and the dripping, splashing, trickling and pooling of rain, sleet and snow upon the surface of soft photographic fibre paper exposed to light without a camera. They are finely-detailed, x-ray-like silver-gelatine works on paper created plein air on site at night, scarred and marked by organic objects and warped by water. Three sites -one in the Henty River Valley beneath the West Coast Range, another at the Vale of Belvoir near Cradle Mountain and the third on the slopes of Quamby Bluff -were visited between mid-2005 and mid-2006, respectively. Compositions were meticulously planned and prepared in daylight. These daylight pre-exposure set-ups generally required a full day to compose, measure out and install, on site. After nightfall, under portable safelights, a pre-cut sheet of chlorobromide black and white photographic fibre-paper is placed on a pre-prepared support frame inside, behind or underneath vegetation during precipitation. The paper is then exposed to a carefully precalibrated flash pulse aimed at the emulsion surface. Processing and chemical toning are later undertaken by hand in the artist's Melbourne studio. The Rain critically reflects upon the idea of 'tragedy' in biological nature through use of the visual tropes of the negative (absent) shadow and chance 'damage'. The project conjectures that the tragic is perceivable in the non-human biotic both in-itself and through analogy with the human experience. Thus, these scarred, creased and muddied 'works of nature' evidencing biota and precipitation suggest the gloom and inundation allied in the western mind to the Biblical Flood as well as the generic 'streaming' tears of grief. Equally, such 'broken', intricate surfaces revealing an act of human will intervening in 'nature' allegorise the 'flow' of biotic cycles, the precarious condition of the rainforest site and the immanent 'tragic' transformation of all terrestrial nature (including climate itself) into a cultural artifact. The Rain extends a 14-year practice that has been linked and informed by two primary concerns: the poetic potential of 'wet' photographic technologies and the changing meanings attributed to Nature/nature in the face of modernity. These concerns have predominantly taken the form of an investigation into the idea of the 'biocentric gaze' using plein air camera-less photography. Like earlier projects Cathexis (1992-94), The Wave (1996-97) and Contact (2003-04), The Rain radically recasts the idea of 'landscape photography' as a relational, process-centred, tactile act (parodying scientific method) in which the convention of the immaculate emulsion surface is rejected and the epistemological boundary separating art (intention) and nature (accident) is muddied (sic). The Rain has Land Art antecedents in its use of natural phenomena yet its closer affinities are with the ecological drawings of John Wolseley and the provocative fabrications of Christian Boltanski or Adam Fuss.
Transcription - 2005
These artworks were made in and interpret the 'Meringur Flora and Fauna Reserve', a 3-square-kilometre block of relict Victorian Mallee landscape. The scale of the imagery is life scale and the outer shape of most of the pieces replicates exactly the proportions and shape of the Meringur reserve. All the works are 'shadowgrams': images made on photographic film that has been exposed to light without a camera. The shadowgrams are of two types: raw 'negative' ('shadow') films made plein air on site at Meringur and 'positive' (tonally reversed) films exposed by contact with the outdoor originals in the studio. The plein air 'shadowgrams' record living vegetation, animal remains and, in one instance rain drops that were touching or adjacent to sheets of photographic film exposed to flash and moonlight at night on site. They were then chemically processed, toned and notated with texts by hand in the studio. The texts are quotes from ecological publications, local headstone inscriptions and nineteenth century Mallee literature including the journals of early explorers. Most of the 'positive' (secondary, tonally reversed) films have been sandwiched together to create multi-layered, translucent composites or palimpsests. The plein air pieces reveal an unfamiliar, x-ray or ghost-like vision of a landscape. In contrast, the complex palimpsests are like inscrutable maps evoking the imaginary presence of Meringur itself. A little piece of woodland Meringur Flora and Fauna Reserve is located some 60 kilometres west of Mildura. It is a small (3km2) rectangle of remnant semi-arid woodland bordered on three sides by public roads and completely surrounded by farmland. Located amid semi-arid sand plains much of which was cleared for wheat growing in the 1920s, the reserve is designed to protect relict belah, pine-buloke and savannah woodland together with associated wildlife. In terms of size (small), shape (geometric), management (minimal), location (disconnected), future (uncertain) and condition (a natural system impacted by grazing, woodcutting and exotics) the Meringur reserve is typical of much of what remains Australia's original landscape. An ecological genius loci Transcription is a 'semi-devotional' ecological artwork that presents a conceptually and emotionally layered response to the remnant, discontinuous and beleaguered condition of one Australian natural site and, by implication, generic nature as a whole. The project critically reflects upon the tension between a purported, dominant 'anthropocentric' response to the non-human realm at one extreme and an emergent, speculative 'biocentric' gaze at the other. This perceptual continuum pivots around a presentation of the site as genius loci: the classical idea of place as the habitat of a distinctive deity or atmosphere. Though long discredited in western culture, genius loci is invoked here as a useful concept ripe for contemporary ecological reformulation. The material form of the project manifests this polarity. The plein air negative pieces reveal an unfamiliar, ghost-like vision of the geographical. In contrast, the palimpsests of reversed 'positive' images suggest a revered presence, a stand-in for the genius loci of the unseen site. The title of the project is both explanatory and ironic. At one level it characterises the physicality of the artist on site, the technique of making the intended film 'positives' from contact with the plein air 'negative' works in the studio and of plein air image-making in which the environment literally touches, marks and abrades the photographic material. At another level, the term points to a quality of relationship to land/nature: the actuality, the possibility or the yearning for emotional or 'spiritual' meaning in ecological place. Allusions to anthropology (colonial 'first contact' with other peoples) and science fiction (notably Carl Sagan's story of contact with alien worlds in the book of the same name) reinforce the poignant portrayal of nature/place in this project as an idealised and desired, plundered yet perhaps unreachable other ethically and existentially outside industrial culture. The shape is a trope The rectangular 1:2.67 proportions of most of the artworks is a visual trope that replicates precisely the map outline of the reserve subject. The repetition of the reserve shape suggests that most of the artworks are miniatures or scaled-down facsimiles of the bio-geographical, a presentation that resonates with a pre-modern iconography of veneration through representation. Such a formal rectangle is also an ironic reference to the 'window' format traditional in two-dimensional (anthropocentric) western art, including pictures about landscape. The isolated geometric visage of the works connotes the dislocated, circumscribed condition not only of the site in question but of natural refugia the world over. The flat rectangle of the imaging surface may also be understood as an analog of the quadrat of biological field research and, in particular, scientific experiment. In this project, the proceedings of each photographic 'experiment' followed a rigorous protocol analogous to experimental method: the results were 'analysed' and the experiment repeated in the same and/or at different sites. Thus, science or more accurately empirical method is parodied, not as a critique of empiricism but as a pointer to other additional, religious, experiential or subjective, ways of knowing. Layering The project employs the plein air pieces to make a secondary sequence which are each compiled, layer by layer, into 'positive' repositories or palimpsests. In this context the plein air pieces may be seen to represent direct unmediated experience, whilst the translucent sandwiches are each an 'anthropocentric' idealization, reconstruction or recollection. They are the result of control, mediation and thought. Acts of imagination Unlike conventional photography, the contents of the intended outdoor plein air images could not be seen with the naked eye, even during daylight. They had to be visualized imaginatively. Each composition involved meticulous locating, marking out and visualising of a potential composition in daylight. The opacity of objects, the direction, focus and overlapping of shadows falling upon the intended film position had to be conceived in the mind's eye alone. They could not be seen literally. Thus the plein air shadowgram works are acts of imagination rather than records of experience. The method is plein air and by contact The photographic film is an orthochromatic gelatine silver emulsion on a transparent polyester base cut from roll stock. The first stage of image making involved meticulous location and marking out of a composition in daylight. After nightfall, a pre-cut sheet of film was held taught inside an alloy frame placed in position on the ground, next to bushes or in trees behind the intended subject. Aluminium stakes in the ground supported the film and frame with low-level subjects. A portable aluminium gantry was used to raise the film and frame aloft for high level subjects. Outdoor exposures were executed under portable red 'safelights' after nightfall using available moonlight and a precisely calibrated flash pulse directed at the film surface. Each exposed negative was processed by hand, chemically toned and spotted in the darkroom before being inscribed with notations using a scalpel, trimmed and encapsulated in a protective mylar envelope. Each positive film was made by pre-calibrated exposure in contact with an individual plein air piece on a light box. It was then processed by hand, chemically bleached, toned, trimmed and sandwiched with other pieces before being encapsulated in a protective mylar envelope. The poetics of silver Silver gelatine emulsions have been used for 'rational' and 'poetic' reasons consistent with the split sensibilities investigated in the project. On the one hand, traditional photography may be portrayed as a simple, industrial technology ideally suited to optical conquering of visible nature. On the other hand, it may be considered deeply interpenetrative with the world: as Roland Barthes has written, a photographic recording produced by the action of light transmitted from a subject "is literally an emanation of the referent". As such, it may be supposed to harbour the possibility of life in that the miraculous response of silver halides to light seems akin to the behaviour of a living organism" The irony of plastic The use of resilient transparent plastic (polyester) film, a pre-eminently 'industrial' material, rather than opaque 'organic' paper, as the support underlying the silver gelatine emulsion was a choice made for practical, metaphorical and conceptual reasons. In practical terms, film facilitates handling without tearing under rough plein air conditions, the application of textural inscription by hand and the superimposition of multiple translucent images to create palimpsests. Metaphorically, the delicate, translucent quality of film imagery suggests the vulnerable, ethereal and unseen. In conceptual terms, film references the in-camera 'negative' of traditional landscape photography (which the project purports to critique) and is an ironic use of an inert, synthetic substance to imprint wild nature and articulate a 'biocentric' sensibility. The landscape is the camera By abandoning the camera in favour of the shadowgram, a direct interplay of artist, ecosystem and emulsion, the project is an attempt to manifest an alternative way of seeing to the cool monocular conventions of the western landscape photography tradition. This use of the shadowgram may be understood as an attempt to merge or replace visual conventions such as renaissance perspective, the picturesque and the sublime with what ecologist Aldo Leopold long ago dubbed a 'wilderness' or 'land' aesthetic predicated on the direct apprehension of ecological integrity. As the chosen means of imaging, shadowgrams reveal an imprint of nature otherwise invisible to the naked eye or camera vision. They are a kind of cross-section or x-ray of the world in which, in effect, the landscape becomes the camera. Making the plein air works is intended to replace aggressive acts of 'capture' (encapsulated by the conventional photographers phrase 'to shoot') or theft ('to take') with gentler, slower, process-centred procedures of uncertain outcome that are akin to ritual. The process also necessitates a bodily, tactile, visceral contact with art making materials and natural phenomena absent, bypassed or suppressed by remote, virtual and digital forms of land reportage. Three kinds of mark The plein air works contravene the convention of the immaculate photographic surface: under plein air conditions the imaging material is often scarified by the physical presence of abutting organic objects, soil and weather. All have been 'redrawn' after processing using a scalpel and chemical toners. The work of Transcription thus contains three kinds of mark: photochemical (the photographic image created by light in situ), kinetic/biochemical (abrasive/physical created in situ) and human (hand-drawn, redrawn). Aura Both the materials and methods used point towards a photographic art imbued with a little of what Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' described as the aura (originality, emotional presence, uniqueness) otherwise absent or diminished in reproduced and reproducable art. To the extent it is detected in the plein air shadowgrams -or their contact-printed inversions- such an 'aura' is the resonance of mark-making by both a person and land/nature. Intention or accident? The conditions in which the plein air works' were created mean that they are in part a product of chance and happenstance. That is, they are neither simply products of nature nor the artist alone, but both. In this sense, Transcription muddies the epistomological boundary separating accident (nature) from art (that which is human). Transcription has been undertaken in collaboration with Dr Peter Christoff., a Melbourne University geographer and environmentalist. Dr Christoff has researched the site and helped inform the theme and content of the text inscriptions that were added to the images.
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