photographyguestlecturetask1b

[photographyguestlecturetask1b]

Landscape Photography and Culture Identity

Peta Clancy is a descendant of the Bangerang people from the Murray Goulburn region of southeast Australia. Her photographs explore the hidden past of colonialism and the bloody history that threatened the survival of indigenous peoples. Through actionable photography, she seeks to rekindle awareness of aboriginal culture and reveal a history that has been hidden.

Her landscape photography "Undercurrent" is a good example. For me, at first, I saw the beautiful natural scenery of Australia through her works. These pictures of the lake and the landscape on the water formed a beautiful combination. I noticed that the water seemed to be a distinct dividing line in these photos, and even in most of the photos, there was a distinct difference in tone between the upper and lower parts of the water. At first, I thought it was a color error caused by the setting sun shining on the water, but I simply thought the scenery was beautiful and mysterious. As a foreigner, I am not very clear about the history of aborigines in Australia, but when I learned about the background of this landscape photography series, my mind was completely changed. This series of works looks at these landscapes from the perspective of indigenous people. The water is like a dividing line between the past and the present. The tranquil present contrasts with the bloody history, giving these pictures a distinctive meaning. The Dja Dja Wurrung community, where these pictures were taken, was the location of a massacre of indigenous people, but the colonial occupation of the land and the destruction of the natural environment and waterways have turned the place into a lake, leaving nothing but tranquilness，just like the brutal history never happened. If you look at these pictures from the perspective of the aborigines, how sad these pictures are.

Dominik Mersch Gallery. 2021. Peta Clancy - Dominik Mersch Gallery. [online] Available at: <https://www.dominikmerschgallery.com/artist/peta-clancy/> 

Peta Clancy. 2021. Peta Clancy. [online] Available at: <https://www.petaclancy.net/#/undercurrent/> 

Art, Design and Architecture. 2021. Dr Peta Clancy. [online] Available at: <https://www.monash.edu/mada/about-us/people/peta-clancy> 

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2+2=5

Today we have Dean Cross to give us the lecture. Dean Cross is a trans-disciplinary artist primarily working across installation, sculpture, and photography. In the lecture, the first thing he discussed was that 2+2=5. This is Dean's definition of collage art, which I think is a very imaginative and accurate definition. I deeply agree with this definition. Collage is undoubtedly a special art form, which uses existing materials and resources to rearranges them. This is not a simple combination of various materials but a process of recreating new works and give them new meanings.

In Dean Cross's opinion, collage operates in people's visual field as accumulative sculpture in a flat plane. He mentioned David sculpture and DaDa's sculptures ideas, and he thinks that as a very early example of accumulative sculptures, it gives the sense of 2+2=5, from completely unrelated raw materials, to form a new sculpture. Personally, I agree with his view that the stack of materials can create completely different results, which is the art of collage.

Dean Cross has also been implementing this 2+2=5 concept in his works. Among his work, his work Poly-Australis impressed me the most. Dean Cross found a book of Polly Borland's photos, and the book is called "Australians." Then Dean Cross found that everyone in the book is white, except one person. He decided to use the mark to disrupt, displace and dislocate the old and broken myth that Australia is, and was ever, a White country. He just used a marker and pictures from the book to create a remarkable and meaningful collage. This work carries out his thought of 2+2=5. Through the graffiti of the marker pen, it expresses the irony of colonialism, the hope of de-capitalization, and the recognition of his identity.

Radio National. 2021. PolyAustralis #19 (Cate Blanchett). [online] Available at: <https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/booksandarts/ex-wr-l-tf17-27-1.jpg/9047716> 

Deancross.com. 2021. [online] Available at: <https://www.deancross.com/polyaustralis> 

COBO Social. 2021. Breaking the Chains of Colonial Linearity: In the Studio with Dean Cross | COBO Social. [online] Available at: <https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/dean-cross-studio-visit/> 

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Exploration of the fundamental connections between people by photography

Kate Mitchell is an artist whose practice spans video, public interventions, and sculpture. In today's lecture, she showed us her new series called "All Auras Touch."

Nowadays, the digital world simply algorithms to tag people and divide them by different jobs, different tastes, different working periods. But Kate Mitchell is more interested in the forces that determine our identities, which cannot be seen and cannot be touched. Kate Mitchell called that Auras and she has actually made that possible with something called 'aura photography.' This series uses a unique concept. She uses special equipment called AuraCam 6000 to capture the 'cosmic energy fields' within people, and which gives a beautiful and colorful result.

Generally, All Auras Touch is an artwork that uses census data to form the frame of the project, there are 1023 jobs on the list, and Kate Mitchell took a portrait of each occupation. "It's a hugely outward-facing work because its completion relies on the public participating in it," she says. She didn't want to show the audience how these careers were different but to highlight the ways in which we are essentially similar. This is a brilliant work, and it makes me thinking although people got tags on the outside, it cannot represent who you are or what you are made of, just like a red chair is not red. It is just reflecting the red color, but absorbing other colors of lights, it presents us what it is not. And people are the same. Our jobs represent us, but we are totally not our jobs. I can be a college student, but at the same time, I can be a son, a friend, a classmate. People cannot be defined by a simple tag. We are all multifaceted human beings with all kinds of complexities, hopes, and dreams. In that way, everyone is the same.

Kate Mitchell. 2021. Kate Mitchell. [online] Available at: <https://www.katemitchellartist.com/#/all-auras-touch-2020/>

Carriageworks. 2021. Kate Mitchell: All Auras Touch - Carriageworks. [online] Available at: <https://carriageworks.com.au/journal/video-kate-mitchell-all-auras-touch/> 

Abc.net.au. 2021. Artist seeks bungee jump master, goat farmer and zookeeper for 'aura' portraits. [online] Available at: <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-28/sydney-artist-kate-mitchell-new-age-portraits-australian-workers/11822846> 

Art Almanac. 2021. Kate Mitchell: All Auras Touch - Art Almanac. [online] Available at: <https://www.art-almanac.com.au/kate-mitchell-all-auras-touch/>

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The unique beauty of collage art

With the continuous development and innovation of photographic art, photographic collage is gradually becoming a new "favorite" of current photographers. As a unique art style, it constantly absorbs the essence of various types of art and gradually forms a new mode of thinking and observation method.

Zoë Croggon is a Melbourne-based artist whose work includes sculpture, video, paintings, and mostly collages. Her practice considers the relationship between the moving body and its surroundings, thinking about the role we play in the environment, and how our surroundings profoundly affect the pace of our lives. Created primarily from found photographs, her works studies texture, light and form, examining the possibilities and limits of pictorial abstraction and metamorphosis.

Collage is a really fascinating medium, said by Zoë Croggon in the lecture. She thinks that collage is both destructive and constructive, it is a complex form. It can be seen as an inherently violent medium, because the process of collage is basically destroying the image, like re-create someone else's work, slicing other’s images. But it is also a sort of delicate, remedial, contemplative process.

This picture I like it most in her new series. It is called “Slip of the tongue”. She always uses moving body in her work, “I am interested in how dance can reformat and repurpose the body.” Said by Zoë Croggon, the body becomes depersonalized, an objective and metaphoric instrument in her work. And she also adds architectural elements to her collage work, and even her own paintings, which really inspired me. She reformats these abstract elements and then rearranges them into an aesthetically pleasing whole image. She redefines these pictures, which is like a display of her inner world. In my opinion, this is a remarkable process. Photography is a highly subjective art, and through this art of stitching, she endows these pictures which have been defined by photographers with new meanings. I think that is what makes collage unique.

Daine Singer. 2021. Zoë Croggon — Daine Singer. [online] Available at: <http://www.dainesinger.com/zoe-croggon> 

van Wyk, S., 2021. Zoë Croggon: artist interview | NGV. [online] Ngv.vic.gov.au. Available at: <https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/zoe-croggon-artist-interview/> [Accessed 30 May 2021].