Stills Gallery. Sydney
until 2 May 2015

Jane Brown’s beautiful and ambiguous photographic work appears to originate from a different era but simultaneously depicts contemporary subject matter. The meticulous process that Brown employs and the careful presentation of her hand-printed, black and white works, places them in a liminal realm between being images and objects.

The title of her latest series Black Ships suggests the idea of a Western perspective on Japan. ‘Black Ships’, was an idiom used by the Japanese for Western vessels approaching their shores and dates from the 16th century when the hulls of Portuguese vessels were painted black with pitch. The term became a symbol of the end of Japan’s isolationist policies and the modernisation that ultimately ensued. The images in Brown’s Black Ships are laden with symbolic meaning – pathways and bridges to reflect the idea of a journey, bandaging and wrapping symbolic of past wounds, walls and fences figurative of boundaries and cultural isolation, nature and decay referencing the Japanese concept of mono no aware (mortality and a pathos for the transience of things). A key image features the cherry blossom, richly symbolic in Japanese culture and celebrated for its ephemeral beauty, whilst also a symbol of nationalism. In World War II, for example, kamikaze pilots would paint them on the side of their planes. And the souls of dead soldiers were thought to be reincarnated in the petals of the cherry blossom.

Ultimately, Black Ships is a travelogue that looks to the strange machinations of history, and at the same time, a reflection on contemporary Japan. Seen through a traveller’s eye, it acknowledges the photographers who travelled there in the mid 19thcentury (the timeless gardens of the Silver Pavilion and the natural environment may well have been documented in daguerreotype 150 years ago). It also responds to Japan’s militarism of the 20thcentury – born out of the policy to modernise – and the horrific consequences of atomic warfare. Brown aims to convey the complexity of emotions experienced when visiting a city like Hiroshima. More broadly it is an articulation of curiosity, seeking out points of difference from home – the peculiar, the beautiful and the unfamiliar.

Jane Brown has exhibited widely in Australia. Recent exhibitions include Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria, The Sievers Project at the CCP, Island of the Colourblind at Breenspace Sydney, CCP Declares: On the Nature of Things at The Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australian Gothic at Edmund Pearce, Melbourne. Brown is a recipient of the Art and Australia/ Credit Suisse emerging artist award for 2013 and was a 2012 and 2013 finalist in the Bowness Prize at the Monash Gallery of Art. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Art and Australia journal, The Australian and The Age newspapers. Her work is held in major Australian collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria.

More info…

Salmon Rocks. silver gelatin photograph from 4×5 pinhole camera by David Tatnall.

Monash Gallery of Art. Victoria
2 May 2015
12.30 – 3.30pm
$75

In conjunction with Earth Matters: Contemporary Photographers in the Landscape exhibition.

Join exhibiting artist DAVID TATNALL and discover the landscape around MGA in a new light. Bring your camera and your imagination as we create new views of the landscape using scanners and photocopiers in this hands-on workshop.

Bookings essential, includes afternoon tea

$60 Friends of MGA & students

$75 non-members

More info…

This write up is much later than I wanted it to be and before the details of the weekend become too hazy and the write up becomes a work of fiction, I wanted to get something posted.

The Phillip Island meeting was the fifth Large Format Group event, again very kindly organised by Richard White. I had previously attended the first two in Beechworth, however due to my disappearance to other pastures for a year, I missed out on the 2014 meetings. A shame because, as I experienced on the first two, the community of large format photographers in Australia are a bunch of weird, wonderful, helpful and friendly people.

Phillip Island, located south west of Melbourne, is most renowned for its motorsport connection and, as many people didn’t fail to tell me, penguins. Sadly, I personally saw neither of those two things – well, not entirely true, I did see a single penguin… let’s just say it was sleeping – but I did see some beautiful coastal seascapes which are my favourite settings to photograph. Phillip Island offered a fantastic array of coastal seascapes, each offering something different from the next.

I visited the amusingly named Nobbies, the wreck of the SS Speke at Kitty Miller Bay and The Pinnacles and Cape Woolamai and captured a number of photographs at each, some of which I was very pleased with.

In between exploring the Island, as usual we took the opportunity to have a “show and tell” of various photographs that had been made since the last meeting. I had the audacity to take a couple of wet prints that were basically the first wet prints I’d made in over eight years (up until recently, my large format workflow was a digital one) which simply had no business being among some of the incredible prints that were shown on the Saturday.

The nature of the weekend means that the group as an entirety breaks up into smaller groups to explore on their own rather than the fifteen or so large format photographers congregating en masse in one spot. But come the evenings, we gather together to discuss the day and to talk photography. It’s a very casual, ad hoc weekend and it works very well as it does. The topic of making a more formal, scheduled weekend came up from time to time, with no absolute conclusion but I believe the overall feeling was people enjoy the weekend as it is. I certainly do.

Thanks must go especially to Richard White for taking on the arduous task of organising the location and accommodation and, personally, to Shane Booth, who kindly picked me up from the airport and chauffeured me to Phillip Island and back.

The next venue is provisionally (or definitely?) planned for Canberra and so we hope to see some of the usual crew who were unable to make it to Phillip Island.

I couldn’t not mention the single victim of the weekend, Shane Booth’s Wista which took a wind-assisted dive off one of the rocks, obviously in a bid for freedom. Respect is due as Shane took it very well.

And thanks to Shane, Richard White and David Tatnall for the photographs.

ARAT (Another Rock Another Tree) is an engaging exhibition of black and white photographs of trees and rocks but they’re “more than” just trees and rocks! The images have captured the form and texture of rocks and celebrate the life of the tree.

Our ability to perceive quality in Nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands through successive layers of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language

The Healing Garden by Ricky Maynard

Until 8 June 2015