Canberra Contemporary Art Space presents The Great Dividing Range, an exhibition curated by Lisa Byrne featuring artists from Queensland, Victoria, NSW and the ACT. The artists each deal with issues relating national identity.

Scott Morrison and the Anti-Monument Coalition each use the recent Cronulla riots in Sydney as a subject to investigate how our ideas of identity are constructed. In Morrison’s case, TV footage of the riots and media interviews are manipulated to a re-present the media’s seamless commentary and create a new narrative of the events. The Anti-Monument Coalition focuses on the contradictions inherent in social and political ideologies that lead to conflict and revolution. They sight the recent race riots in Cronulla, and the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon as indicators of such contradictions within cultures.

Artists Helen Johnson,Waratah Lahy, Luiz Martinez, Joan Ross and Tony Albert interrogate the cultural, historical and social conventions to give their own interpretation to dominant community beliefs systems relating to suburbia, rural and historical identities, and indigenous cultural representation.

In his catalogue essay ‘Our Beach’ for the exhibition The Great Dividing Range, Mark Hislop puts forward the notion that it is the specifics of language used by the media and government in issues such as immigration and foreign policy that leads to an intolerant and fearful community.

The recent Cronulla riots in Sydney shows how our sense of ownership and national identity is intrinsically linked to our colonised history and cultural belief systems. Our intent and capacity to colonise, to make the environment our own through language is crucial to our sense of right of ownership.

In "Our Beach" Hislop writes

The title of this exhibition ‘The Great Dividing Range’ is used metaphorically to refer to the breadth of

 The Desert of the Real Itself is the title of both the exhibition and a series of faux-polaroids with varying relationships to reality, constructed from found images and photographs I have taken myself. There is particular connection between the timeless nature of Polaroid photography(suggested by image quality/colour temperature) and the scary nostalgic quality of, for example, the planned town of Celebration, Florida. The link between authenticitiy and the past ( the idea that things that are older or come from past eras are somehow more real) is also considered through use of a simple and tactile method of cut and paste as opposed to digital technologies.

Stephanie Hicks

Like many painters these days, Trevelyan Clay mixes visual motifs and languages from a variety of sources. Some belong to high art and the painterly tradition .... Others belong to popular culture and mass media. ... The images are anything but casually conceived, or randomly spontaneous, built as they are from a complex layering of self refrence and critical irony.

excerpt from Spendin' Time on an Image, written by Russell Smith for the CCAS Studio Residency Program/2005 published by CCAS, Canberra December 2006

Lisa Byrne
February 2006

Social Capital grew out of the history of Canberra Contemporary Art Space’s current location at Gorman House Arts Centre. In 2004 Canberra Contemporary Art Space received Arts at the Cutting Edge funding from artsACT towards the development of new works by five ACT artists and a social historian. It seems timely that upon my departure from Canberra after six and half years that this project opens reminding me of some of the extraordinary historical narratives found in Canberra.

Once a boarding house or hostel for newly arrived citizens of the ACT, Gorman House was one of the earliest locations of public housing in the ACT. The recent history of Gorman House’s building usage got me thinking about the history of public housing in the ACT and how this contributed to a greater sense of local social capital.

Upon further consideration it became quite obvious that Canberra does indeed have a unique public housing history. Social historian Mary Hutchison, one of the seven contributors to the project has a wonderful piece in this catalogue that describes the range of ‘guvvie’ housing available in Canberra and the way in which these houses came to influence the community psyche of Canberra.

Each of the five visual artists commissioned to make a work for Social Capital have responded in thoughtful ways to the brief. Cathy Laudenbach, Anna Zagala, eX de Medici and Martyn Jolly use documentary modes of visual language to provide various perspectives on the present and past experience of living in public housing in the ACT. Bernie Slater and Ellis Hutch use the experience of housing to inform works that depart from a more literal approach to the subject matter.

Often in thinking about history of place much of what is deemed remarkable is event based and associated with dates. In contrast this project acknowledges the many and varied people, t

 2005 Residency Program - Artists' Exhibitions

I have always had an interest in personal identity and the creation and perception of identities. In this work I aim to create a narrative based on the relationship between two characters and to take them out of the regular photographic format of the rectangle or square. I also explore the picture plane by having sections of the image extend or recede from being completely flat. The characters are placed in an alternate world by removing the background and cutting out the desired objects, layering them on the wall to give a slightly 3D effect. This turns the characters into objects for the viewer to project their own views onto and to play with in their mind.

 “I am interested in exploring the space between the actual state of affairs of a given and defined subject/situation (in this case Israel) and the numerous ways it has been handled in its representation.

‘Over that hill...are people’ is a response to my visit to Israel. It is also an exploration into the ways in which Israel’s history and actuality may be represented. The imagery is derived from photographs that I took while in Israel as well as things sourced from the Internet. Things like maps, diagrams, propagandaposters, plans and texts. With these differing source materials I compose pictures that focus on different aspects of Israel’s society and history.