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9/2/2010

Group emerging show

Stills Gallery, Sydney

Max Creasy
Emidio Puglielli
Roberta Thornley
Naomi White

In our first exhibition for 2010 we present four emerging artists working with the enigmatic auras of photographs and objects.

Max Creasy’s carefully constructed images play between illusion and representation, between the facsimile and the real. They invite doubt about the process of photography and the viewer’s relationship to it. His still life scenes are cast from plaster, hand painted and photographed. The process of painting interrupts our understanding of the role and effects of light in the photographic process. This layered construction of the scene creates an uncertainty in the eye of the viewer.

With an eye for oddness, and for the tension between domesticity and nature, Roberta Thornley’s photography explores the obsessive things people do in their anxious search for perfection and happiness. Her work is both painterly and cinematic, revealing what seem to be suspended moments in mysterious unresolved narratives. She says, "I want my photographs to ask questions, and I want them to be rich with narrative possibilities. At the same time I try to evoke atmospheres that oscillate between melancholy and desire. It’s a difficult combination but I keep trying." Roberta Thornley graduated in 2007 from Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts.

Emidio Puglielli has a keen interest in old photographs and their continued resonance in contemporary society. He collects vernacular photographs to use and re-image in his work. Their material nature is the main focus; he addresses the photograph as an object and uses it as a subject. Physical elements of interest include: paper type, size, decorative edges, but particularly damage and added text. He is interested in the way these elements impact the reading of the image. The work is reflexive. It points to itself to question what photographs are and what they do to and for us.

Naomi White’s Soap War features a faux bathroom made out of cardboard. On the mirror a sign says "No more soap girls! It was STILL being wasted". Her graduating series Out the Back explores work environments and their effect on employees. She has re-created the otherwise off limits staff areas using the packaging material that one might find there. The banal, neutral toned surroundings, peppered with motivational and instructional signage highlight the ultimately de-motivating atmosphere of these workplaces. The scenes are delightfully subversive and frank.

Image: Emidio Puglielli, Military Edit, 2008, from The Through, type C print 45.5 x 49cm, edition of 4

Stills Gallery
36 Gosbell Street Paddington NSW 2021 Australia
Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 11.00 am - 6.00 pm

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