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Indepth Arts News:
"Polixeni Papapetrou: AUTHORITY, Andrew Curtis: VOLT, Darren Sylvester: WE CAN DO ANYTHING, Joachim Froese: RHOPOGRAPHY"
2001-05-04 until 2001-06-10
Australian Center for Photography
Paddington, NS,
AU
These four exhibtions deal with different subjects and issues. In her latest body of work, Polixeni Papapetrou explores sartorial marks of status. The tension between the idealised and the lowly underpins the work of Andrew Curtis. The slick perfection of Darren Sylvester's images and the borderline cliche of the texts can lead one to read his work as a parody of advertising, but one would be wrong to do so. In this presentation of work made especially for ACP, Joachim Froese continues his construction of melodramatic metaphor using dead insects.
In a series of photo-digital triptychs Polixeni Papapetrou compares the motifs of aristocratic power in Renaissance Europe with the designer-name tee shirts of contemporary urban culture worldwide. The work questions the apparent democratisation of the ubiquitous designer tee shirt. Are contemporary design houses the new and future royalty, and the logo-wearers the new vassals, followers of a highborn notion of fashion?
Andrew Curtis' nocturnal images of electricity substations in suburban Victoria suggest the magnificence of the monumental and the banality of the everyday. Caught somewhere between the objectivity of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the stylistic surrealism of David Lynch, Curtis' luminous colour images bring vividly to life a barely perceived aspect of the suburban landscape.
Darren Sylvester is not a cynic, but a die-hard romantic. The care he bestows on the surface of his images is in order to elevate their reading, to deny the viewer the easy option of cynical dismissal.
In Joachim Froese's work, Rhopography (from the Greek rhopos), refers to the trivial objects and trifles of daily life. Here, in apparently dynamic scenarios which belie their many days of construction, and in a scale that presents the miniature as grand spectacle, beetles and bugs play out dramas of epic proportion. Once again, but in a very different way, there is the paradox of high ideal and lowly subject combined with a seductive handling of surface.
The Australian Centre for Photography is funded jointly by the Australia Council and the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts.
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