ELLEN DAHL, YVETTE HAMILTON, AND IZABELA PLUTA
“RESURFACED GEOGRAPHIES”
11 APRIL – 18 MAY
“Resurfaced Geographies”, installation view, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Resurfaced Geographies is an artist-led exhibition by Izabela Pluta, Ellen Dahl, and Yvette Hamilton that charts the intersections between topography, place and photography in the age of the Anthropocene.
“Resurfaced Geographies”, installation view, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
Topography, place and photography are all defined by their unstable relationship between the real and the imagined. While topographical elements of a landscape are considered to be real - a fixed point, the concept of place fluctuates between memory and cultural construct. However, in a time when our natural environment is marching towards inevitable change, destruction and disappearance, the landscape’s topography is moving into a state of flux and the ability to map the human self to the land is on shaky ground. Photography echoes this uncertainty, its indexical relationship to the ‘real’ a tenuous one prone to slippage and disruption.
Ellen Dahl, Untitled/Fissure, 2019, Archival pigment print, 33 x 46cm, Ed. 1/5 +2AP. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
The three artists in Resurfaced Geographies work within, or in response to, photography and the concept of place. Each artist will present new work that charts the idea of the landscape in flux and the resulting effects on the geographical imagination when place and topography begin to overlap.
Izabela Pluta embraces photography as a way of interpreting and re-conceptualising the role performed by images. For the exhibition, she will continue her exploration of processual phenomena and engagement with the uncertainty of the ecologies of relation and place. Her new work will employ the camera-less process of contact printing to create a series of translations from a book depicting the Yonaguni monument.
Ellen Dahl often uses the landscape as an entry point to explore the juncture of identity with the concept of place – whether physical, political or psychological place. Working with archival images from Norway and Australia, Resurfaces Geographies continues her fascination with these North/South peripheries, trepidations around the Anthropocene and the destabilization of geographical demarcations.
“Resurfaced Geographies”, installation view, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
Yvette Hamilton looks at the landscape as a mode of vision and the failures inherent within it. Her new work for Resurfaced Geographies is based on recent research trip to Scotland looking at abandoned colliery sites and lighthouses, which aims to examine the idea of the landscape photograph – a genre that speaks more of the vision of the photographer than the topography of land.
Yvette Hamilton, Survey, LED lights, acrylic, microprocessor, coal dust, custom frame, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
While photography facilitates a unique chance to shape how we remember a physical landscape or a place, time blurs the lines between the real and the imagined of what this may come to represent psychologically; it could have been, it is, it might be.