Provenance
Painters, Printers, Sculptors, Photographers, Sound Engineers and Poets ... we can often become familiar with artists' work but not the indivuals themselves.
With Provenance I wanted to create portraits of artists behind the art. I chose to present them decontextualised from their art practice so as not to influence or distract you, the viewer, from the presence of the person in front of you.
The portraits were created through a combination of medium format film photography and modern digital techniques. My first major show for 2017 is on now at the Huw Davies Gallery, Manuka Arts Centre until the 10th of September. Thank you to everyone at PhotoAccess who has been fantastic in the preparation for this show.
The Portraits
The Artists (and the Backs of Their Heads)
The Invitation
Back & Forth
'In Sequence'| PhotoAccess members' exhibition - Back & Forth
I have a new piece in the first Member's Show of 2016. Entitled Back & Forth, the work comprises a sequence of 7 images looped and presented in a digital frame. It looks mesmerisingly cool. The opening is next Thursday (28 January) at 6pm at the Huw Davies Gallery.
Some gallery blurb about the show
The first PhotoAccess members’ exhibition for 2016, 'In Sequence' presents works creatively addressing the notion of sequence and narrative in photography. For many artists, photography is not only about single images, but relationships between multiple images. A sequence of images can tell a particular story or narrative, create a sense of visual poetry, or suggest movement and time passing. 'In Sequence' aims to showcase a variety of approaches to the notion of the photographic sequence, using traditional, experimental and digital photographic techniques.
• Opening: 6pm 28 January 2016
• Where: PhotoAccess - Huw Davies Gallery, Manuka Arts Centre
• When: 28 January – 21 February 2016
New Show: Barriers - Break or Breakthrough
I'm very pleased to announce my next show Barriers: Break or Breakthrough opens next Wednesday at the Belconnen Community Center. A collaboration between myself and Marina T, the show explores our different reactions to change. Our working proposal:
Change is a fundamental part of the human experience. Often our difficulty in accepting change can stem from our inability to understand it. Barriers explores the the transitional processes involved in interpreting change.
The exhibition revolves around the centerpiece of a glass-encased clay sculpture of a human skull, which acts as both metaphor and motif of change. Meditations upon the centerpiece take the form of sculptures, and poetry.
The skull, which we have nicknamed Eno was made by Marina, features in each of the photographs. Each of the photos explores a different emotional response to change ... these comprise Anger, Fear, Denial, Delirium, Mourning and Acceptance. Here is a selection of the photographs from our shortlist for the show.
The show also features several poems written especially for the show and a number of new clay sculptures from Marina.
We made a flyer advertising the show too ;-)
Along the way we have also established domain for our working collaborative artistic endeavours 2 Tens & A Tomato under which we exhibit and also produced a short film (shortlisted at the 2015 Lights! Canberra! Action! short film festival. The site is a little lean at the moment as we concentrate on getting things together for the show and really only shows a copy of the flyer for the show but please stay tuned on that front.
Links
- About 2 Tens & A Tomato
- 2 Tens & A Tomato
- Sexy monochrome flyer version
If you're in Canberra next Wednesday evening (18th November) at 5:30pm ... please come along and say hello to us :-)
If Canberra is simply too far to come ... please wish us well :-)
#gdphoto #2tensandatomato
The One Project
Toward the beginning of the year I had lunch with my friend Hilary Wardaugh, an accomplished photographer around Canberra, and she described a project she was putting together. Hilary explained that she had a Nikon FM-2 manual film camera with a 50mm f/1.8 lens laying around and was planning to load a film into it, compile a list of photographers and pass the camera to each photographer and ask each one to take a picture. Once the picture has been taken, it became the photographer's responsibility to contact the next person on the list and arrange to get the camera to them. At the end of this process, about 3 months, Hilary will get the film developed and scanned. Each photographer will their digital negative and can process it as though preparing a print in the darkroom ... that is curves and levels and filter colours but no pixel based PhotoShop edits et al. The processed negative will be passed back to Hilary who will then arrange printing of the image for the purposes of exhibition. Two shows are currently lined up for the prints, one local (at the Huw Davies Gallery in Manuka) and one in Sydney (as part of the Head On Photo Festival).
The camera travels in a box containing the list of photographers, a cable release and a book in which the photographer is encouraged to write a short piece about their picture. The project is called The One Project.
So far so good... the only stipulation was that our picture had to be a portrait!
No pressure... it's only a single frame... I mean it's not like the other twenty-odd photographers are all accomplished photographers (they are!) and will be doing their very best as well... reading through the book I smiled when I saw that everyone else was obsessed with light, exposure and focus ;-)
I wanted my portrait to be of my artistic collaborator Marina. I have photographed Marina extensively over the past two years and together we came up with the idea that often you only have an impression of someone through the images you see of them. So I put together a grid of photos I have taken of Marina and projected them digitally across her face and arms and splashed across a dark background the pictures resemble stained glass. I set my digital camera to emulate the manual settings of the FM-2 and to act as a light meter for correct exposure. The effect is one of an essentially dark shadowy image with bright pictures shaping contours but ... visible upon closer inspection ... you see Marina illuminated and looking out from the shadows. It looks great.
Then it was swap the camera over on the tripod, recompose and recheck the settings (and recheck them again!) ... I re-posed Marina and got the composition right and while she was looking perfect I felt it was right pressed the shutter release ... pa-tchang! Done! In my excitement however I had failed to warn Marina I was about to take the picture and she thinks she may have blinked but can't recall where the blink may have been in relation to the exposure. I'm sure it'll be fine! I do feel like a goose though! My main concern is that given the dark nature of the photograph (light-wise not emotionally-wise!) and the different response of the film to shadow and highlight my contribution to the project may in fact just turn out to be a black frame! But then that's the risk you take in trying something less safe I guess :-)
The photos I took with the digital body look great and I would include them in this post but I don't want to publish anything until I see how the film version came out which won't be until November. I'll do a contrast and compare then as a separate post :-)
But I would like to thank both Hilary and Marina. Marina firstly for being my muse and sharing her art, ideas and vision so freely with me ... my world simply wouldn't be the same without her in it. And Hilary for coming up with the idea of The One Project and making it happen, for the necessary artistic angst and discipline (well OK maybe I didn't take home all of the discipline lesson) this project inspired in me.
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.
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 :-)
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 :-)
Dead Pegs
The first printed compilation of my Dead Pegs project ... a copy of which is currently hanging in the Members Show at PhotoAccess in the Manuka Arts Centre.
I've been long fascinated by these pegs ... single-function objects that have reached the end of their useful lives and left to decay in the pebble-field beneath the clotheslines ... I've been photographing them on and off for about 6 months now ... time to get them out there ... both prints measure 420mm x 720mm.
Dead Pegs was printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth - a fine matte paper with excellent colour depth
Also in the show is a print of my Starfield I picture printed on Baryta Photographique, a fine grained lustre because I thought a small degree of gloss would increase the depth of the picture ... given it's our galaxy after all :-)
Both pictures were printed by Stephen Best of Macquarie Editions in Braidwood.
Links
2012 Royal Canberra Show - Clean Sweep
The Royal Canberra Show is held every year to celebrate and showcase the very best that the region has to offer. I have been entering photographs into the Canberra Show Art Prize for the past three years. There are four classes in which to enter photographs;
- Open
- Landscape/Places
- People & Portraits; and
- Black & White
I always try to enter a photo into each class and I have picked up several 1st places over the years in various classes. This year though something quite remarkable happened: I won every class! I still have not quite gotten my head around quite what this means but really it's an excellent result! The photos and their classes are presented below;
'wall works' (a preview) - ANCA Gallery
'wall works' 7th - 22nd December 2011
Last week I was given a heads-up by friend and artist Nicci Haynes about an exhibition on at the Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Gallery in Dickson. Apparently ANCA are repainting the gallery over the new year period and have invited a select group of artists to use the walls of the gallery as their canvas. The show is called 'wall works' and I went along on Friday afternoon to take some photographs and was impressed by the scale and quality of work going on in there and I present a selection of images below. I highly recommend anyone interested to do the same.
The show opens officially on Wednesday 14th December but is open to the public now for anyone interested in the creative process. Of particular interest to me were the wall size works by Byrd and Hanna Hoyne, the intricate musings of Paul Summerfield, the 'there but not there' figures of Nicci and the vibrant etchings of Tesss Horwitz.
From the ANCA website "Six local artists transform the gallery by working directly on the walls. Byrd with Hanna Hoyne, Mariana del Castillo with Gus McGrath and Alex Asch, Nicci Haynes, Tess Horwitz and Paul Summerfield. Curated by Narelle Phillips"
A second post with more images from this session can be found HERE
'girl on the floor' by Nicci Haynes
Hanna Hoyne
Byrd applying some fine detail
Entry Designs by Paul Summerfield
'fire extinguisher surrounds' by Paul Summerfield
'white crouching figure' by Nicci Haynes
Artist Byrd
Hanna Hoyne
Tess Horwitz