Sunday Arts Magazine

Boroondara Arts’ first exhibition of 2021 will be Reconfigured/Rediscovered, as part of the PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography, showing Saturday 23 January – Sunday 11 April 2021. Six artists will come together to question the relationship between image and reality, asking how images operate and how they can be created without a camera.

Reconfigured/Rediscovered brings together a group of artists to extend our perceptions of photography and image-making into new realms, challenging the very nature of pictorial representation and photography’s inherent self-reflexivity with examples of bold, boundary-pushing experimentation. Featuring artists Christian Capurro, Ben Cauchi, Danica Chappell, Peta Clancy, Daniel Crooks, Izabela Pluta and Robyn Stacey.

Christian Capurro is an artist, photographer and filmmaker using digital and analogue tools, media and processes. For this exhibition Capurro has re-purposed tripods, a large specimen being the first object to be encountered in Act One of Two Shores (pictured above). Secured upside-down to the floor, it towers up on a slight incline, as if to greet us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ben Cauchi is a New Zealand photographer based in Berlin, represented by Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney. Cauchi’s practice examines the nature of photography, the passage of time, and the psychological dimensions of viewing, using very early photographic techniques on glass or metal. For Reconfigured/Rediscovered, Ben will showcase his One Owns Grey series. In his practice Cauchi uses traditional printing methods, such as ambrotypes and tintypes, to create darkly ethereal, contemplative images, which pose questions about mortality, the subconscious and pictorial representation itself.

Danica Chappell is a visual artist based in Melbourne who has a curiosity for spatial-temporal abstraction. Working with the elasticity of process from ‘darkroom haptic’ actions, Danica skirts the peripheries of photography to deconstruct material conventions.

Peta Clancy is a Melbourne-based artist who is a descendant of the Bangerang people from south east Australia. While her practice has incorporated a number of different media, Clancy is primarily a photographer and has a strong history of residencies and participation in academic conferences. Her work explores corporeality and a sustained interest in the physicality of photographic prints. (Work pictured above left)

Izabella Pluta’s practice embraces photography as a way of interpreting and re-conceptualising the function that images have in the present. Negotiating the possibilities of how material forms come together, she draws largely on finding, fragmenting, translating and reconfiguring things that are both photographed and found. Izabella explains: “I have this very precarious relationship with photography. I am invested, consumed by and in love with the medium and all the complex ideas that come from it, but then I try to resist its language, or I question its use. Maybe that’s why what I make is increasingly shifting – moving across, photographing out in the landscape or in the studio, collecting material that I then disorientate from the original source. An attempt to slow down the experience of looking but also to test different ways of imagining what a photograph can be and make us more attuned to how images operate.” (Work pictured above right)

Daniel Crooks works pre­dom­i­nant­ly in video, pho­tog­ra­phy and sculp­ture. He is best known for his dig­i­tal video and pho­to­graph­ic works that cap­ture and alter time and motion. Crooks manip­u­lates dig­i­tal imagery and footage as though it were a phys­i­cal mate­r­i­al. He breaks time down, frame by frame. The result­ing works expand our sense of tem­po­ral­i­ty by manip­u­lat­ing dig­i­tal ​‘time slices’ that are nor­mal­ly imper­cep­ti­ble to the human eye.

Robyn Stacey is an acclaimed Sydney-based photographer known for transforming entire rooms into walk-in camera obscuras. Masking windows to leave just a ray of light, the view outside is projected, as if by magic, over the room’s interiors, but upside down and in reverse. This dream-like moving scene does the opposite of a shadow. It casts trees, drifting clouds, even towering buildings, over the internal architecture and its inhabitant’s belongings. “It’s like being in your own private movie”, says Stacey, who photographs this inside-outside union in the fleeting minutes when light and composition are just right. Stacey will exhibit Dark Wonder series, featuring well known artists’ studios, homes and creative spaces overlaid with the view outside.

Reconfigured/Rediscovered is part of the PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography which brings together photographers from across the globe to create thought-provoking works that explore the critical relationship between photography and ‘The Truth’.