Dirty Water is an exploration of nuclear activity in Australia. It raises many questions, and powerfully associates them with a shared nostalgia. Nuclear matter has often been tested, mined and dumped on Aboriginal land- with devastating consequences- but it has affected many more Australians, including all of Adelaide when a radioactive cloud from British nuclear tests at Maralinga passed over in October 1956.

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In some of the video works, the transport of radioactive materials and nuclear waste through the Australian landscape and via bush highways is cheekily depicted. For instance, in Nuclear Highway barrels of radioactive waste tumble carefree through a small town, past road signs and men mowing a grassy median strip. In other videos, Aboriginal women move through landscapes that have been irrevocably changed by colonisation, their presence highlighting how Indigenous people have been forced to change the way they interact with land that they have been living with harmoniously for many thousands of years.

Having lived in the outback and worked in Aboriginal communities, the political is personal for Alder, but she does not expect everyone to share her concerns. Either way, Dirty Water can be enjoyed as an exhibition of beautiful printed images, moving in both senses of the word.

excerpts from essay by ANNIKA HARDING 

There’s something about photographs that makes people trust them. Clem Baker-Finch questions this inherent believability by exploring and exploiting the use of photographs in trashy magazines.

In these magazines- such as OK, Women’s Weekly or New No Idea- photographs are often provided as evidence. Evidence of celebrities’ rocky marriages or lovers’ quarrels, disordered eating habits and potential ‘baby bumps’.

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Baker-Finch appropriates an image cropped from a magazine cover, and lets the words speak for themselves through the image. It’s all in the process: a computer program that he devised picks out the average colour of where a letter will go and writes the next letter in that colour, so that the words are woven tightly into the image. Even though these images are from cuttings, you can’t escape their magazine context- headlines, bar codes and inset images all push their way into view.

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Baker-Finch also significantly enlarges these small cuttings from throwaway magazines, further highlighting the gravity, tragedy and also the humour in these modern relics of celebrity culture. But Baker- Finch isn’t being polemical; he is just making an observation, and like the readers of trashy magazines, the viewer must choose what they want to believe.

excerpts from essay by ANNIKA HARDING

With a background in both archaeology and visual art, U.K. Frederick is interested in the relationships that we form with objects. For Lament, she is exploring the record, and the exhibition will include prints made from records and music digitised from those same records. Through this combination of image and music, Frederick creates a reflective space in which the viewer can experience the enduring emotional effect of records and their music - an effect that can take you to a different time and place.

Frederick prints directly from the record, calling attention to the record’s physicality-and conversely the disembodiment of music bought online. It is this physicality that people bond with, and perhaps one of the reasons that they are still so valued by many people. Some of the magic of records lies in the fact that you can love it to death by playing it over and over again, as the sound quality and surface gradually wears away . ...

excerpt from essay by ANNIKA HARDING