PhotoAccess opened their next suite of Huw Davies Gallery exhibitions: Between Hope and Despair by Natasha Fijn, Eating Wild Weeds by Alex Flannery, and Archive Apparitions by Elisa deCourcy. In this suite of exhibitions the artists transverse time and place, exploring the possibilities of cross-cultural and/or intergenerational communication.
Between Hope and Despair Natasha Fijn
Exploring the possibilities of inter-generational communication in the aftermath of crisis, Fijn juxtaposes her observations of temperate Australian forest recovering from the devastating 2020 bushfires with her grandfather’s record of the American liberation of Nazi-occupied Maastricht in 1945.
Eating Wild Weeds Alex Flannery
A collaboration between Flannery and Chinese born Australian poet Ouyang Yu, Eating Wild Weeds considers the complexities of cross-cultural understanding. Images and words investigate seeing, knowing and experiencing life in another country, engaging questions of visitation, migration, communication and being part of a multi-national family.
Archive Apparitions Elisa deCourcy
Archive Apparitions emerges from extensive research into the experience, materiality and significance of early photographic portraits in the mid nineteenth century Australian colonies. These works mediate on colonisation, separation and identity. Featured among their sitters are luminaries of contemporary Australian photographic practice and scholarship along with descendants of historic daguerreotypes held in national collections. This series is historically inspired but uses historic processes to tell new stories of migration, environmentalism, family, and photography's role as a container of memory.
Dr Sarah Engledow, the designated historian and a curator at the National Portrait Gallery from 1999 to 2019, formally opened the exhibitions on Thursday the 21st April, 6pm. The exhibitions are open until Saturday 21st May 2022 at 4pm.