The Autumn season at the new-look Australian Centre for Photography delivers the weird along with the strangely familiar. Video, photography and installation by New York-based Swiss artist, Olaf Breuning creates a world of pop-ethnography and subcultural pastiche that rubs against notions of good taste. Meanwhile Ed and Deanna Templeton cast their insider eyes on America's youth counterculture and Glenn Sloggett reveals the humour and pathos at large in Melbourne's suburbia.
Olaf Breuning "HOME"
A master of the constructed scenario, Olaf Breuning's videos, photographs and installations draw liberally from advertising, movies, television and music videos. He dishes up a glam-trash fantasy world, an archive of alternative realities. Equally enamoured with the heavy metal and the new age, historical costume drama and serial killer splatter, the courtly and the degenerate, he cultivates bizarre intersections of reality and fantasy in which pop culture's interlocking clichés are amplified and exploded.
This exhibition is a co-production between ACP and IMA (Brisbane). It has received funding from Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Consulate in Australia.
Image-makers from a self-indulgent generation, Ed and Deanna Templeton both deliver a vision of American youth as unnerving as it is celebratory.
Ed Templeton "Be Passers By" and Deanna Templeton "Your Logo Here"
Well known as pro skateboarder and artist, Ed Templeton's diaristic photography deals with the everyday phenomena and personalities that intersect with his life and travels. His pictures connect events with individuals, objects and history, creating landscapes of personal and psychological geography. Be Passers By includes recent 35mm and Polaroid work.
Deanna Templeton uses her photography to explore issues and places that are recurring themes in her life. Your Logo Here explores a viral marketing phenomenon where young men and women agree to have corporate logos spraypainted on their bodies while they walk around on the beach - transforming them into cost-free roving advertisements.
Glenn Sloggett "Cheaper and Deeper"
There is a dark and off-colour humour at work in Glenn Sloggett's photographs of suburban Melbourne. Devoid of people, we read the signs and traces of suburban life in his images of dereliction, failed aspiration and abject domesticity. However, these are not pictures of disgust, but a sort of affection. He articulates that quintessential Australian trait, the ability to find the last glimmer of optimism in the midst of inevitable failure.
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