Thoughts on a show
I'm sitting in the café adjoining the Front Gallery, where my show is currently on. My opening was last night and I'm feeling a little bleary. My sunglasses hide the bags beneath my eyes that must surely be a giveaway to the seediness I'm currently experiencing. I'm here ostensibly to imbibe coffee and eggs and bacon to assuage my mind into a connection with the absolutely stunning spring day that is in full swing outside. I'm also here to spy ... to see who's looking at my photographs and which ones they linger over and discuss. From time to time I wander in to tweak the lighting or straighten a picture. I tend to do this when there are people in the gallery and I can have a talk about the images and how they were created ... people have been very nice and said many congratulatory things. I've even sold two of the pictures, one which has been hanging in my bedroom for the past year and a bit, I will miss when it goes to its new home. I will miss them all if they go. They're little pieces of me ... each one a photographic journey now rendered manifest and framed and hung upon a wall.
I imagine their new homes and spaces, there's a part of me that would like to visit them there ... to see how they inform and play in their new surroundings. Other folks will see them every day and I wonder about this ... quite inordinately.
I realise I've spent three hours here now ... becoming slightly more human with each coffee (maybe one more?) and finding myself gazing blankly at the other patrons in this Inner North Wi-Fi hangout, bent over laptops or skipping the world, reading their Kindles ... I notice very few are actually talking ... even the couples with mismatched devices are intently studying their own ... noone is reading a book ... not a paper one anyways. There's one couple; I'm not convinced they're an item though he wants to be I think and he's constantly trying to show her amusing things on his phone and she's looking awfully bored ... increasingly so the more insistently he appears to not read the body language and blind to the look of disdain each time he offers his screen ... but then he's not looking at her ... he's looking at his phone and therein lies the problem.
A bit rambling today but there you go...
Through a Glass Clearly
There’s a moment when you notice something. Something that catches and teases. It may be the curve of a tree or the lightness of a feather drifting on a warm spring breeze ... unseen but for its effect upon the small things. Mostly for me it’s about the light. The way light plays with the things around us and renders them beautiful or dramatic ... the darkness of shadows and that gradient between glow and gloom. Sometimes it’s about trying to capture and entire world inside something much smaller ... concentrating it ... refracting it back at myself through the transience of a water droplet or a glass sphere.
It is as much about the journey of a photograph. A sinuous chasing down of the beauty you saw that very first time, the tender play and rendering of a picture until a certain essence is revealed ... a little something of what was seen made manifest and shared.
That’s what these pictures are. They’re little fragments of time and space collected and coalesced and placed on walls ... distilled results of the myriad journeys undertaken to create them.
In these I hope to show you just a little something of the thing I saw.
The collection of images on show.
About the Title
Through a Glass, Clearly is a collection of four short stories written by Isaac Asimov and first published in 1967. One story in particular: It’s Such A Beautiful Day, is set in the year 2117 and presents District A-3, a newly built suburb of San Francisco, and the world's first community to be built entirely using Doors, a method of travel via teleportation.
When the Door that transfers him from home to school fails, Richard "Dickie" Hanshaw takes a dislike to the method and starts to wander outside in the unfamiliar open, exposed to the elements. When he catches a cold, Mrs. Hanshaw is horrified and takes him to see Dr. Sloane, a psychiatrist, afraid that her son's wanderings are signs of a mental abnormality...
Geoffrey Dunn is a multi-award winning and internationally published photographer. He is entirely self-taught. Through a Glass Clearly is his third and final solo exhibition for 2014. The title of the show is also a reference to the act of capturing light with a camera ... through a glass clearly...
The details...
- What: Through a Glass Clearly - New photographic works by Geoffrey Dunn
- Where: The Front Gallery - Wattle Street, Lyneham, Canberra
- Duration: 17-29 September 2014
- Opening: 6pm Friday 19th September 2014
Links
- MEDIA RELEASE Geoffrey Dunn - Through a Glass Clearly
- Show postcards: Front and Back
- The Front Cafe & Gallery
- My printer - Stephen Best of Macquarie Editions
Confidence and Value
I was reading a post on Nigel Featherstone's excellent blog Under The Counter Or A Flutter In The Dovecot earlier in the week. Titled The confidence of the threadbare, the post provided a short examination of how our society values the work of it's artists. In this particular story Nigel, a writer, was asked what he considered the dread question whilst perusing in a shop "What do you do for a living?" ... the question, perhaps innocuously asked by somebody wishing to make conversation stirred in our protagonist a dark reflection and mumbled reply. What it did set off was a train of thought upon how confidence and value affect not only our artistic or cultural contributions but about how we are perceived as artists.
Confidence and Value indeed. I struggle with these daily in the creation of my work. There's the dread moment when someone asks, generally well-meaningly or at least with some interest, 'what sort of pictures do you take?' ... I have answered 'bloody good ones' if I'm in a great mood and 'lots of mediocre ones with a few flukes that people seem to like...' if not so but that's demeaning to myself and my art. It's not a fluke that this creative passion nourishes me, gives me some measure of meaning and direction in this otherwise confusing world. It's not that I don't take a fair share of mediocre pictures either.
Putting on a show of your individual artistic works is another matter. Unlike a stage show with a duration of two hours, your work is on public display for weeks at a time. Will people like it? Will people like me as a result is perhaps a more self-accurate question. Do I care? If I'm asking the question then perhaps yes I do... if I were to stop to ask myself why I'm doing it I don't believe there'd be an answer - not one that would be intellectually coherent anyways. "I just have to." is the best I can come up with...
I have spent some 15 years as a semi-professional musician, dressing up on stage and taking people on musical and story-based journeys ... mostly for the love of it ... there's little in the way remuneration(!) and for that magical feeling of walking both on stage (that delicious tingly nervous buzz) and walking off stage feeling that you've been somewhere yourself ... that your exertions; physical, mental and spiritual have been nourished and refueled. I guess that takes confidence but funnily enough I've never considered myself overly so.
Having got back into exhibiting my work again this year (after a break of several years), running two concurrent and greatly different shows in July (all I can say in my defence was that it seemed a good idea at the time) and currently shortlisting images for my third and final 2014 show in September, I feel I'm almost too busy in prep to be concerned with confidence ... almost ;-)
As for value ... that's a tricky one ... well, I find it tricky anyways. I've not yet found the best quantitative measure to assess it. In an instagram world where everyone's a photographer, it's hard to see the artists sometimes. I find pricing the work on show particularly difficult. Too high and it becomes inaccessible, too low and and it loses value quickly ... the pricing I find most interesting is to ask a prospective purchaser what they think is a fair price for the work and then we negotiate from there.
What about you? Do you battle with these notions of confidence and value? Do you price your work? How do you do it?
In other news ... shortlisting and preparations for my solo show Through A Glass Clearly progress apace ... will post separately about this soonly :-)
Feathertalk
I do love feathers. I do love water droplets. The way the drops form tiny spherical lenses when placed upon the hydrophobic barbs on the surface of feather quills. It does something for me, this feathertalk ... it really does. Here are a couple of examples shot on my bathroom window sill ... :-)
In other news I'm busy short-listing for my final show this year. Through a Glass Clearly is a solo show I'm putting on at the Front Gallery here in Canberra opening in mid-September. It will feature retrospective photographs covering just about all of the genres I shoot in ... which, looking through my shortlist ... covers quite a few! ;-)
More new and updates as it progresses.
Shoot: The Second Movement show band
Last week I had the opportunity of taking a few pictures for the The Second Movement show band when they got together for their mid-week rehearsal.
A little history... The Second Movement played in and around Canberra in the late 60’s and early 70’s and were resident band at the Civic Hotel Lounge. The group became resident band at the Deakin Inn when it opened in 1969. The band played at the Deakin Inn up to six nights a week for four years until they retired in 1974.
In 1967 the band signed a recording contract with EMI and recorded two singles, which were released nationally. The singles were produced by Robert Iredale (who was Johnny O’Keefe’s’ record producer at the time). The singles had moderate success and made it into a few top 40 charts.
After a thirty years’ absence the original band (there were some personnel changes in the early seventies) decided to get together for a 30th anniversary party bash at the Southern Cross Club Canberra. Some of the band members hadn’t played in a band since the band retired in 1973. Others no longer lived in Canberra so the logistics of a reunion offered many challenges. However the project went ahead and the night was a huge success. The band enjoyed themselves so much it was decided to continue the band which would make itself available for the occasional booking.
Ostensibly to create a few simple pictures to refresh their website, the session was fun and enjoyable and a lovely bunch of guys the majority of whom have been playing together for more than 40 years! The band member whose house was used as the rehearsal space restores old Jaguar cars ... he had an absolutely gorgeous red E-Type Mk2 that you can see the band posing with in a couple of the photos.
The band did insist in standing outside in the bright noonday sun which caused a little squinty action but the sunshine and blue sky certainly set off their matching blue stage suits! I did manage to convince them to pose together in the back shed where the featured image was shot ... that one's my favourite from this little shoot.
Links
In An Attic of Her Soul
In an attic of her soul
retreated
walls growing close with encroaching gloom
outside clouds blacken low with late twilight hue
shadowed eyes of a mother gaze outward
left behind
inside
while life outside marched on
with passions external
cradling with a stiff arm
the child looking upon with hungry gaze
while she searches and searches and searches
forever waiting
with mannequin's gaze
for signs and signals
of where her love has gone
In An Attic of Her Soul ... a work intended for the 2 Tens & A Tomato show with Marina but didn't make the shortlist ... for this show anyways ... the next one definitely :-)
Back Study
Somewhat wordless - Back Study (bedroom blind with street light)
I like their somewhat grainy Gothic feel ... like the cover for a This Mortal Coil album or something designed by v23 Envelope.
Saturday's Sunset
Sun's departing rays
day collapses into embers
hot kisses linger
While at the coast on the weekend I witnessed a brief but fiery sunset. I was reminded of a quiet fireplace, embers burning aglow and of how a sunset is like the sun drawing the light of the day back into itself as it departs the sky ... the earth still warm and glowing from it's day-long kiss. An utterly romantic view of course of otherwise straightforward planetary rotation, but I like to indulge the romantic notion of collapsing light and embered skies.It adds a certain beauty to the world and that transition from day into night which we loosely call twilight when it is neither day nor night but a betwixt and between of experience and anticipation ... a time when there's a seeming pause to the world.
And then there's 'hot kisses linger' ... well they do ... don't they? :-)
Saturday's Sunset was captured at Malua Bay on the south coast of New South Wales ... the sky was afire but only for a moment.
In Your Eyes
In your eyes
I see the world anew
feel an unconditional love
see the joy in life
and the small things that matter
the beauty
of mud between my toes
of creating something new
the tears
at the injustice of the world
of frustration when it just didn't work out
When you look at me I see myself in you
see the love returned
I feel you there
feel you working me out
you see the mixed emotions in my eyes
the love for you
In your eyes
I see your life stretch out to horizons I cannot imagine
things I will never see
... I see my own mortality then
as I felt when you were born
I knew then my days were numbered by you
Acutely
Aware
My life is yours
forever
(22 January 2014)
A poem I wrote for my children and featured in Two Tens & A Tomato
Postcards from a Show
For someone who hasn't exhibited work publicly for a couple of years I'm really quite in the thick of it now. I find myself in the position of having not one but two shows running concurrently and they both represent different aspects of my artistic endeavours.
The first show, Zoologica, is running at the Kaori Gallery until 2nd August and the second show, 2 Tens & A Tomato, a collaborative joint exhibition with visual artist and poet Marina, is at the Front Gallery until 28th July.
When approached by the Front Gallery in June about a sudden vacancy in their gallery calendar I was at first hesitant ... I was in the thick of organising Zoologica and didn't want two photographic exhibitions running concurrently ... but when Marina and I spoke about the potential of a joint show combining our poetry, writings, imagery and imaginations we decided to pitch our ideas to The Front ... and they said 'yes'. That was about three weeks before the show was due to to open and at that stage we had no completed ideas not to mention any completed collaborative works to put on show.
The show contains 20 works including clay sulpture, images and words, installations, mirror-books and photography. One thing we both realised as we brought the work into being for this show is that we had far too much and indeed have enough material for another two thematic shows at least! We have been busy!
The installation Carousel, featuring suspended words bent into fencing wire so that their shadows play against the wall and surrounded by photos of those very wiry words draped around the necks of the City's antique (and still operating!) carousel and blue velvet with blue lighting forming a small stage ... it turned out beautifully ... the words, by Marina, run as follows;
A broken carousel
My life
A dead Burst
of sound and colour
Staring blankly
at one another
We ask
With rusting words
why the ride
never begun
We are deeply indebted to my good friend Alex (and his son Tristan) for assisting us with the installation of Carousel along with a number of the other works through his unique solutions to our hanging requirements (and above-all by remaining calm!). I'm including a number of pictures I snapped with my phone (when I remembered to) whilst setting up the show.
In addition, Marina and I are guests at this month's Canberra Poetry Slam where we will be reading works from the exhibition. This is happening on Friday night at The Front in the bar adjacent to the gallery space.
It's all go! I'll be in to document the show later this week and will post about that separately :-)
2 Tens & A Tomato
Hi, just a quick note to let you know about a new collaborative show of fresh art and words from myself and visual artist and poet Marina. We have mixed poetry, photography, sculpture and installation into works exploring the written word and visualisations of poetic elements. The show will opened by PS Cottier, renowned poet and local.
The show is titled '2 Tens & A Tomato' and opens this Thursday evening at 7pm at the Front Gallery in Wattle Street, Lyneham ... be great to see you there and show off the works personally ... plus the gallery's attached to a pub and there's a band on too ... art, alcohol, live music and interesting people ... sounds like fun.
In addition, Marina and I will be guests of the July Canberra Poetry Slam the following Friday 25th July where we'll be reading works featured in the show.
The details in point form...
- What: 2 Tens & A Tomato - Fresh art and words from Geoffrey Dunn & Marina
- Where: The Front Gallery - Wattle Street, Lyneham - 17th-28th July 2014
- Opening: 7pm Thursday 17th July by PS Cottier ... that's like this Thursday ... yeah we know :-)
- Poetry Slam Readings: Friday 25th July - 8pm
ps ... my solo show Zoologica is still running at the Kaori Gallery until 2nd August ... it's all go at the moment! G :-)
Zoologica I - selection and hanging
OK so I have been putting together (what I realised is my first) solo show ... titled Zoologica: a photographic study of life through death. Exploring zoological specimens, the works encourage you to ponder the nature of scientific collection, death and preservation. The series comprises 12 monochromatic prints, printed on Canson Baryta Photographique by Stephen Best of Macquarie Editions in Braidwood. The final series of 12 is shown in the gallery below. I've gone with hanging the prints unframed using linen hinges and small tacks. I'm really impressed with the printing quality and the light curl of the paper really adds to the apparent depth of the images. It's a great feeling when you see your own work on a wall ... and a real buzz when there's a series of your own work up like this.
I hung the show yesterday with gallery owner Michael and it looks fantastic ... it'll look even better when fully lit.
The opening is Wednesday evening at 6pm and I'm rather looking forward to it :-)
Naturey Macro
A gorgeous early winter's day day in Canberra and a trip with friend David to the Australian National Botanic Gardens for some naturey macro pictures. David is interested in purchasing a macro lens so I've lent him my copy of the Tamron 90mm SP to have a play with. The day was cold but beautifully clear but a little on the windy side for nice calm macro shooting ... still, I came away with some nice pictures ... hope you like them too.
In other news ... my preparations for the Zoologica show are progressing and I've completed drafts of the poster, postcard and list of images appearing in the show ... as well as capturing some new images yesterday while out and about. I've also signed up for a joint photos/poetry show which will run in another gallery at the same time as Zoologica ... I'm going to be a busily creative boy ... wish me luck! :-)
Creepy Dolls
Creepy Dolls and the Teddys left behind
Do you find old dolls a little creepy? You know, the ones oft found at garage sales, second-hand shops or historic houses? Like a lot of objects once loved, they embody something of the abandoned and discarded. Their staring eyes, their presence, their often disrobed and dismembered nature, they lie or sit or otherwise propped up ... seeing but not seeing. I don't collect them but I find myself enraptured by their gaze... Do objects retain a sense of the love and devotion poured into them over time? I'm unable to come up with a rational scientific rationale to support it but there's a part of me that believes it may happen and we simply haven't found a way to quantify it. Perhaps it's the way an object, once the centre of such affection and loving focus, now lies bereft of that love.
When I see one I find myself wondering whether the person who owned it is still alive? Did they like the doll? What did they tell it? Maybe they didn't like the doll ... had it forced upon them by an overbearing relative? Perhaps it was a possessed spinning head ectoplasm spewing doll? (wouldn't that be cool!) What happened to their eyes, their limbs, their clothes? Lost? Separated definitely...
I find myself making up stories for them ... perhaps that's why I find them a bit creepy ... kinda like them.
How about you? Do you share this kinda fascination with dolls and the abandoned? Do you make up stories for them? Do tell :-)