CCASGORMAN HOUSE GALLERY 1
23 March - 21 April
Opening 6pm Friday 30 March
T h e
W a i t i n g
R o o m
Waiting is when time is always in excess and when time is nevertheless short on time. This overabundant lack of time is the duration of waiting.
Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion
Utilising a diverse range of media including photography, sculpture and installation, Canberra based artist Samantha Small explores the underlying fears and anxieties that permeate our everyday experience. In the reconstruction of documented crime scenes, her recent work has focussed on the encoded violence and latent insecurities housed within the domestic interior.
In this exhibition of new work Small diverts her gaze from the private interior and invites the viewer into a space similarly laden by psychological vice. In The Waiting Room the physical and psychic dimensions of waiting are made material through the transformation of architectural forms and furnishings commonly associated with these intermediary zones.
Reinterpreting the objects of distraction encountered in the waiting room, Small extends our attention to the fish tank, the stack of outdated magazines and the children’s toys in the corner, to re-present the act of waiting as a process of constructive patience.
CCASGORMAN HOUSE GALLERY 2
SLIDE SHOW LAND
Elvis Richardson
2001 +
Slide Show Land is an ongoing archive, started in 2001 of 35mm transparencies purchased on e-bay. The work catalogues the incredible number of images available for purchase and staggering evidence of the all-pervasive nature of image taking during the last century that so many could have been jettisoned and lost.
The personal family snap-hots draw attention to the photographer as an invisible author or narrator who through composition and occassion reveal family dynamics and customs. Narratives are created through reading the images in sequence and further the viewer into an investigative process of piecing together a probable fiction or identity based on a 'true story'.
This most recent episode of Slide Show Land is compiled from one extensive collection by a photographer named Dorothy E. Elsberry dating from 1952-1976 who was based around the Sacramento area of California.
Dorothy was fond of photographing particular subjects such as her husband Jack, still lifes, food she cooked, dinner table settings, landscapes, and her horses and farm.
The installed work consists of two projectors with 80 slides each – one carousel is of Dorothy's dinner table arrangements of meals lovingly cooked by Dorothy usually on special occasions such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentines day and St. Patrick’s day which was also her birthday. The second carousel are images of Jack, always outside - mainly riding his horses and in the landscape of their farm.
Projected side by side they tell a story of love and intimacy through the table set for two reflecting the interior nurturing and feminine world of Dorothy alongside the exterior masculine world of Jack.
Three images from the collection have been selected to accompany the projections – one as a duratran on a light box titled “Self portrait for Jack” and the other showing the couple dressed in their cowboy outfits in the same spot of a back garden.
Slide Show Land is for the nostalgic and lost.
http://www.theprogram.net.au/home.asp
