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| ACP If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too? |
 OpeningThursday 2 March 2006 6.00-8.00pm Exhibition Runs Friday 3 March - Sunday 9 April Curated by Bec Dean Media Preview Thursday 2 March 1.00pm - light lunch provided. A chance to meet all of the artists and preview the exhibition. Please call (02) 9332 1455 (ext. 204) to RSVP. GRETA ANDERSON (NSW), BORIS + NATASCHA (VIC/Berlin), SIMON CUTHBERT (TAS), NATASHA JOHNS-MESSENGER (VIC), KATE MCMILLAN (WA), FLAPS (NSW), ELVIS RICHARDSON (ACT), IAN TIPPETT (VIC) and LYNDAL WALKER (VIC) Tuning-in to a zeitgeist that is up-on-the-downside If you leave me, can I come too? brings together contemporary Australian artists that convey a sense of humour-tinged melancholy through their practice. Taking its title from the deadpan irony of a Mental as Anything break-up song (1982), this exhibition considers broad social themes from personal failure to environmental disconnection, across a range of photomedia. In his new series, Melbourne-based photographer Ian Tippett makes candid, street-level photographs of the corporate world's new outcasts; cigarette smokers. Captured hovering around doorways and pacing the concrete wasteland with practiced disaffection, they are cast as pathetic figures against a hard-edged urban landscape. Simon Cuthbert's complex photographs consider a society so alienated from the natural world that it seeks synthetic ways to reintroduce the landscape and "transcripts of nature" into the public and commercial domain. A similar interplay of hope and despondency is conveyed through Greta Anderson's project Walking and Talking. In her video and series of photographs, the artist stages small, personal narratives where intellectual preoccupations override physical and visual experiences of the environment. Canberra-based Elvis Richardson has amassed a substantial collection of other people's archives over the last few years. Slides of family history collected from e-bay and second-hand stores are re-configured into arrangements of orphaned moments, no longer wanted by their original owners. Kate McMillan's photo-based installation also trawls ancestral heritage - her own - as an idea she can access only through disconnected imagery. For her photographic series, Stay Young, Lyndal Walker refuses the insistence of eternal youth promised by fashion magazines by turning her lens on young men in domestic settings. Here there is the unglamorous evidence of share-housing, tertiary study and the subcultural affiliations of protracted adolescence. Natasha Johns-Messenger's macro photographs of dioramas meanwhile consider body-language and spatial relationships between faceless, plastic subjects. In the first part of their series, Meditations, BORIS + NATASCHA manipulate the structure of "positive visualization" videos to create a chilling alternative to self-help. And the locally-produced zine of "Westie-chick" humour, FLAPS (Raquel Ormella and Regina Walter) releases a specially-produced issue for Australian Centre for Photography tackling the theme of rejection. |
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The ACP Website
About Australian Centre for Photography (ACP)
Established in 1973, the ACP opened the doors of its first gallery in Paddington
Street, in 1974. In 1981 the Centre moved to Oxford Street where it remains today.
It is now Australia's longest running contemporary art space.
It is the ACP's mission to promote and enrich the understanding of photo-based art
in Australia and this is achieved through a dynamic mix of exhibition, education and
publication. In its blend of activities and range of photographic media, the Centre
is unique in Australia.
ACP opened a Workshop in 1976. Originally in a separate building, this is now housed
within the Centre in Oxford Street and includes black and white and colour darkroom
facilities, a digital suite, lighting studio and library. In 1983 ACP launched the
journal Photofile. It is now the leading photo-based art magazine in Australia,
available through newsagents and specialist bookshops nationally.
Currently located in the heart of Paddington, Sydney's gallery district, ACP houses
two exhibition spaces; a foyer display area and a Project Wall for emerging artists;
an extensive workshop with comprehensive curriculum and public access facilities; a
specialist bookshop and library.
The ACP is a not-for-profit organisation supported by the NSW Government through the
NSW Ministry for the Arts, the Australia Council, the Australian Government's arts
funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of
the Australian, State and Territory Governments. The ACP raises over half of its
revenue from non-government sources.
