AUDIO DESCRIPTION #3
PHOTOGRAPHS 11-15
Crying
Kuba Dorabialski
Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham
August 17 - September 22 2023
Verge Gallery, University of Sydney, Gadigal Country
On this wall, five framed black and white landscape photographs are displayed in a straight line, each measuring 50 centimetres high and 50 centimetres wide. They areprinted on a soft textured paper called cotton rag and the frames are a pale raw oak with a bronze waterfall-like sculpture cascading from the bottom edge.
The first artwork features a sorted stack of cut radiata pine logs in a cleared plantation field, along a straight dirt track. The perspective is slightly heightened, showing the stack of a few hundred logs at the centre of the image, amidst a vast flat field and pine tree lined hills in the distant background. The logs are all the same size and lie horizontally on the ground, forming a low, wide, and sloping mound. Thephotograph is taken on angle, showing the logs positioned diagonally, pointing slightly up to the right, and the round base of each cut tree. In the distance faint rowsof pine trees on low hills extend from the left to the right edges of the photograph.The top third of the image is a clear grey sky. The location is Sunny Corner State Forest, Wiradjuri Country.
The last photograph contains numerous criss-crossing tire tracks from motocross riders in a gravel quarry. The perspective is at eye-level from within a small quarry pit. Across the bottom third of the image, there is a flat area with a slight slope towards the right, displaying many motorcycle tracks. The middle section is the sides of the pit, which are a steep mound of dirt with a flat top edge. There is a prominent track just left of centre, that runs straight up. Lastly, across the top third of the image are the of tops of a dense cluster of dark radiata pine trees under a clear white sky.The location is a gravel quarry in Vulcan State Forest, Wiradjuri Country.
All the photographs showcased in this exhibition, ‘Crying’, were taken by the artist between May 2022 and May 2023. They capture various plantation forests in the Central West of New South Wales, Wiradjuri Country, specifically between Bathurst, Orange, Lithgow, and Oberon. These landscapes feature the radiata pine plantations, the clearings left after harvest, and the small quarries often abandoned within the plantations.