Over the Ditch

Installation photographs, Over the Ditch, 2014.

Photomedia installation, with found and donated photographs, ethnopoetry, and recycled timber.

Over the Ditch, which is part of On Islands Eramboo: Creative Collaboration Festival, is a collaboration between Andrew Gorman-Murray, Chris Brickell (University of Otago) and Anna De Jong (University of Wollongong).

On Islands Eramboo, 15-30 November 2014.

The Antipodes – Australia and New Zealand – are large islands surrounded by the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans, sharing the Tasman Sea as a fluidic border. There is a long history of island-hopping between Australia and New Zealand, which share cultural traits and open borders. Trans-Tasman crossings are colloquially called ‘hopping over the ditch’.

Over the Ditch is a photomedia installation that explores and visualises the experiences of gay men from Australia and New Zealand who have hopped over the ditch. The installation comprises found and donated photographs from seven men who crossed the ditch. They span a period of eighty-three years, from 1931 through the early post-WWII years to 2014. Many of these men wrote diaries, stories and blogs of their journeys too, and these texts are rendered as ethnopoetic verse to add layers to our sense of their experience over the ditch.

The installation takes the form of a journey, with 22 route-markers created from recycled timber, which present a sequence of visual and ethnopoetic narratives from the men. Materially, the route-markers invoke ideas of breaking down fences, journeying through life, and seeking a place of belonging. 

Hopping over the ditch is significant for these men. Experiences on the other side of the Tasman shape subjectivities, identities and cultural worlds and issues social and political messages. Sydney has been a symbolic and material beacon for Antipodean gay imaginaries. Connecting with place – in and through movement – informs who we are. It also builds our relationships with each other. In the last year, around 240 Australian same-sex couples have married in New Zealand, which is now a beacon of acceptance.

Over the Ditch is a collaboration across disciplines, linking history, geography and visual art. In bridging gay worlds across the Tasman, our narratives reach across disciplinary boundaries.

Website: http://www.onislandseramboo.com/teams/zone2/

Slow Burn/Night Vision

Slow Burn/Night Vision, 2014, video still.

Video link: http://youtu.be/kfcxRTMQbWY

This video work responds to public discourse about Australia’s foreign relations in 2014. Concern has mounted in response to international perceptions of the Australian government’s position on climate change, national security, national identity, refugee rights, immigration and economic relations. Arguably, international opinions of Australia’s position and influence in the world system have soured during 2014. Domestic critique insinuates Australia is burning bridges overseas. In critical social theory and critical media commentaries, geopolitics is posited as a game of strategy, surveillance, military and political relations. Foreign relations inherently involve subterfuge – the guarding and discovery of political, economic and martial secrets. Foreign relations are a game of smoke and mirrors, half-truths, deliberate falsehoods and obscured visions.

Slow Burn/Night Vision is a dual-channel video installation, with each channel responding to and visualising two interrelated themes about international relations invoked in the title: ‘slow burn’ and ‘night vision’. The aim is to create a meditative effect – to create a space for thought and reflection on the state of Australia’s foreign relations and place in the world vis-à-vis geopolitics. ‘Slow burn’ speculates on the burning and deterioration of Australia’s foreign relations. ‘Night vision’ presents aerial views of national parliament buildings – US, Canada, UK, EU, Russia and China (nations with which Australia has important relationships) – exploring foreign relations through buildings that materialise national integrity and international correspondence. Common motifs create a dialogue between the channels, in particular the concept of obscured vision – smoke-and-mirrors, night vision effects – and emergency/martial soundscapes. The backdrop creates another layer – another comment on global democracy and citizenship – that grounds both channels, literally, in their installation in space.

The approach to Slow Burn/Night Vision was inspired by the work of several contemporary artists working in different photographic and time-based media, including Douglas Gordon’s dual-channel video The End of Civilisation (2012) and the work of photographers Mishka Henner, David Thomas Smith and Trevor Paglen, whose art comments on the subterfuge of geopolitics, international surveillance and global visions.

Installation photographs, Black Box, COFA D Block, 7 November 2014.

Dual channels projected on 40cm x 40cm reflective perspex.

After

After, 2014.

Inkjet Print on Platine Fibre Rag, 39cm x 26cm.

After re-imagines Nan Goldin’s Gilles and Gotscho Embracing (1992). The original photograph is part of a series in which Goldin documents a gay couple’s intimacy and care in the context of HIV/AIDS during the 1990s. The series traces this partnership over 1992-1993, following Gilles’ decline from health to death (from AIDS-related illnesses). In After, I seek to do more than reproduce the original moment, but rather consider personal and social changes in the context of HIV/AIDS. There have been significant advances in the understanding and treatment of HIV/AIDS since the early-1990s, bringing more hope for dealing with (and living with) HIV/AIDS. We must nevertheless remain vigilant about the personal and social costs of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and at the heart of social issues are personal stories. Thus, I draw on the composition and motifs of Gilles and Gotscho Embracing to elicit a personal relationship in the wake of death and separation. The central relationship in After is between the remaining partner and the teacup and saucer, which is a mnemonic and material anchor for his partner. The tactility and intimacy between the subject and object seeks to question the certainty of sharp distinctions between absence and presence, on the one hand, and loss and hope, on the other. Possessions play an important role for both individuals and relationships: as a mnemonic for the absent partner, such objects also embody endurance in the present and hope for the future. In this case, hope is also for a future where HIV/AIDS is no longer a threat.

Texere: The Unfinished Work of Domestic Assemblage

Texere: The Unfinished Work of Domestic Assemblage, 2014.


Digital Photograph, 30cm x 20cm.

This work was created for the cover of a special issue of the journal Home Cultures, on the theme 'Alternative Domesticities: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Home and Sexuality'. The work attempts to visualise some of the ‘queerness’ of domesticity, taking seventeenth and eighteenth century Baroque still life painting as its starting point. Still life, especially from the Dutch Republic, often referenced domestic themes through the arrangement of domestic objects – food, flowers, fruit, textiles, tools, vases, ceramics, cutlery, etc. This art-historical tradition highlights the importance of the domestic for understanding historical, geographical and social processes. The piece attempts to evoke the materiality and tacility of the domestic. In doing so, the work seeks to elicit contemporary cross-disciplinary themes about the domestic as: a process, a weaving, a representation, a text, an assemblage, an ongoing labour, sensorial, unfinished, messy, and polyvalent. Every element within the image is a textile, making reference to the Latin root of both text and textile – texere – a weaving. Text, textile and representation are always weavings: in this case, a weaving of the domestic as an assemblage of materials, and a process of labour, that is layered, multifaceted and enduring.

Melbourne Tram

Melbourne Tram, 2014.

Digital Photograph, 15cm x 10cm.

This image of a Melbourne tram was taken in the CBD, at a Flinders Street junction, late on a January afternoon, 2014. My intention was to capture the play of light and animation from the buildings, sky and tram while the vehicle was in motion. The effect is an image balanced by four quadrants of light and colour. The image will feature in the 2015 Invest Victoria promotional calendar. 

Empire: Fabricating Interior and Exterior Housing Systems

Damask/FDC Construction Fitout Refurbishment, 2014.

Inkjet Print on Museum Velum, 42cm x 29.7cm.

Argyle/John Holland Construction, 2014.

Inkjet Print on Museum Velum, 42cm x 29.7cm. 

Herringbone/Richard Crookes Constructions, 2014.

Inkjet Print on Museum Velum, 42cm x 29.7cm.

Tapestry/Tony Owen Partners, 2014.

Inkjet Print on Museum Velum, 42cm x 29.7cm.

Empire explores transformations of residential spaces and housing systems in contemporary cities under post-colonial capitalist regimes. Empire focuses on buildings undergoing residential re-purposing in Sydney’s inner west – a site of gentrification and class-based displacement. The work responds to critical axioms of political economy: capital colonises ever-new spaces; capitalist landscapes are unstable; infrastructure melts into air; bourgeois architectural systems, interior and exterior, are constantly reworked in the pursuit of profit. In capitalist housing ventures, economic, financial, material and aesthetic systems intersect to ensure the survival of capitalism. These spheres ‘infect’ each other: bourgeois aesthetics are an avenue for propagating and selling ever-more profitable housing systems. Infrastructure, economics and taste inflect each other. As such, capitalism colonises home environments, just as it has colonised the globe.

Empire explores these concepts through photomontage, and the juxtaposition of ‘viral’ interior and exterior housing structures – fabrication and textiles. The cross-infection of interior and exterior systems provokes consideration of how capitalism invades interstitial spaces to colonise intersecting systems at the same time. Capitalism ‘re-knits’ interconnected spaces – the private and the public, the internal and the external – in order to ensure its enduring success. Textiles and viruses are significant motifs of colonisation. Textile manufacturing was integral to the development of modern urban-industrial capitalism, and a critical market for international competition (which sometimes took martial as well as commercial forms). Meanwhile, the imperial expansion of capitalist nation-states from Europe across the world led to the international exchange and global transmission of new viruses and diseases (e.g. Syphilis, Ebola, HIV) – while imperial-capitalism itself spread virally, reaching into and integrating all corners of the globe.

Installation photograph, COFA, D Block, 29 October 2014.