Chris Bowes: Split. Ben Rak: Don't Be Fooled By The Faces I Wear. Catherine Evans: Exploded View. Huw Davies Gallery. PhotoAccess. Until August 14. photoaccess.com.au.
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Each of these exhibitions expands on what would, by many, be deemed photography. Distortion, caricature, masking, disruption - these are the key elements across the three shows.
Artist Chris Bowes is showing Split. It brought to mind those fun and interesting images in distorting convex and concave mirrors at sideshow funhouses. This installation is a sort of high-tech version of them. Screens and webcams watch and distort viewers, creating caricatures that can be equal parts captivating and disturbing. This installation originally was scheduled to exhibit in the Huw Davies Gallery in mid-2020. Sadly, it was locked down in Melbourne. Furthermore, the same issue prevented the artist from travelling to Canberra to install it himself this year. His other intended exhibit is, unfortunately, missing from the show.
Bowes says, "It is unsettling to think that while we watch screens, they quietly watch back at us. Our interactions feed data to hungry tech giants, whose targeted advertising and helpful suggestions seem harmless enough ... We are often passive to these exchanges, ignoring the consequences that come with sacrificing privacy..."
In Don't Be Fooled By The Faces I Wear, artist Ben Rak examines the phenomenon of "passing" as a condition in both social life and art practice. It also employs methods of screens, this time for masking hidden identities. He attempts to shed light on how we conceal or reveal ourselves in order to gain visibility, avoid marginalisation, and enjoy the privileges afforded to dominant groups.
Rak uses the print process as a metaphor for otherness, drawing parallels between art practice and social interaction. His prints seek to examine changeable identities, investigating how the technical and material language of the print can be combined to mask or reveal its artistic identity.
The exhibited works are diverse; they include large acrylics and silkscreen works on unstretched canvas, laser-cut dye-sublimation prints on aluminium and papier-mâché masks, inkjet prints on fibre-based paper, and a single channel video.
If only we could purchase masks like these each time our current fetish for wearing them is made mandatory. They and the prints are wonderful. Looking at my own reflection in two of the prints, I saw my identity masked.
Exploded View is new work that takes artist Catherine Evan's recollections of the 1997 Royal Canberra Hospital implosion as a starting point to examine how digital media distorts our perception of time, relation to place, and memory.
It takes memory and screen culture head-on in a distorted representation of the artist's personal memories.
When her son was born, Evans looked online for images of the hospital she had been born in, the hospital she watched blasted into the ground.
Evans discovered a home video someone had uploaded to YouTube - two minutes and 31 seconds of VHS footage.
She took screenshots of the video then, using a flatbed scanner to distort them, introduced a disruption of memory.
The result is fascinating images of a scene etched in so many Canberrans minds - shown here as silver gelatin prints made from her digital negatives by putting them directly into contact with photosensitive paper.
Also displayed and available for purchase in the gallery shop is Evans' fictionella Copper (2020), commissioned for the slow-publishing artwork Lost Rocks (2017-21) which investigates the linked events emanating from the Acton Peninsula, currently the site of the National Museum of Australia and previously the Royal Canberra Hospital and over 20,000 years of Aboriginal history.
