Starry Eyed

Official Opening Friday 6 May 2005
6:00 – 8:00pm

A creative mandate to explore both the expressive possibilities and cultural dimensions of ‘new technology’, has catapulted photography to the forefront of contemporary innovative art practice.

To facilitate the community’s general understanding and appreciation of the photograph as fine art, Schubert Contemporary is presenting “Starry Eyed” – an exhibition which profiles nine, nationally recognised photographic artists: Sharon Green, Jay Younger, Ray Cook, Deborah Paauwe, Mari Hirata, Mandana Mapar, Kathy Mackey, Judy Anderson and Brett Adlington. With the exception of Paauwe who resides in Adelaide, all are currently Gold Coast or Brisbane based.

“Starry Eyed” is an extraordinary collection of diverse and highly personal aesthetic responses to life’s intangibles, its rich tableaux a testimony to the immense potency of the photographic medium.

Sharon Green’s theatrical constructions interpret the strictures placed on feminine expression within ‘space, place and history’. Sinister undertones emerge from the dramatic illumination of truncated female forms clad in exquisite, yet binding fabrics. Among the dark shadows and decaying opulence, we sense the palpable

Sparkling with glitter and glitz, Jay Younger’s cibachrome photographs are multi-layered both in technique and symbolism. The “Spin Doctors’ Mirage” series ‘takes form as a poetic abstraction based on a psychological landscape’. Her ‘jewel-like constellations’ are created from smoke and mirrors, with the concepts underlying the series being indirect and the images ‘intended to evoke sensations rather than thoughts’.

Ray Cook’s ‘performative’ photographs represent a return to studio-based practice and days spent in the darkroom ‘creating colours and tones with brush painted layers of chemistry’. A fusion of burlesque absurdity and delicate vulnerability, his images of the solitary clown posturing amidst a dark infinity of suspended stars ‘address issues of gay-male identity and the redundancy of the artist in a consumer society’.

Deborah Paauwe’s visual narratives are also highly directed and intimate in character, her primary theme being the young girls’ transition from innocence to experience. Neither cropped nor digitally manipulated, the somewhat disquieting allure of her imagery resides in an ambiguity created by the superb framing of her subjects. ‘I aim,’ says Paauwe, ‘for an enduring air of the unresolved’.

Also concerned with the nature of time, place and change, Mandana Mapar explores her Iranian heritage and matters of trans-cultural identity. ‘Painting with light’, Mapar dissembles traditional notions of photographic practice and signifies a unity beyond the imposition of political, cultural or gender boundaries.

Judy Anderson ‘collects the murmurs of the everyday’ and collages them into a multiplicity of layers, so delicately reconfigured that their source becomes unrecognisable. Her photographic abstractions seek to capture ‘those interval spaces between growth and dissolution, loss and retrieval, the familiar and the strange.’

Rather than abandon the representational function of photography altogether, other artists have chosen to make their statements through framing and cropping ‘things and places so well-known that they are not well-seen’.

Kathy Mackey’s exotic photographs mimic the ‘receptivity of the tourists’ gaze’. An unsettling familiarity teases jaded sensibilities, prompting and then challenging our need to objectify and compartmentalise the visual experience. A delightful refinement pervades the very formal dynamics of Mari Hirata’s imagery. Employing surreal juxtapositions, unusual perspectives and the rhythm of repeated angles and lines, she creates the patterns and textures of new structures – which in turn, suggest further dimensions beneath the photographic surface. Whereas Brett Adlington’s pared-down, minimalist compositions reflect the remorseless commodification of a landscape where not even the cloudlessly blue skies are immune.

“Starry Eyed” augments the 2005 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts Photographic Award at the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, commencing Saturday 7^th May.