Annette Fisher, Catherine Feint, Fiona Bowring, Greg Stoodley, Isaac Kairouz, Izaak Bink, Jemima Camper, Tom Campbell, Wendy Dawes, Xueqin Yi
VIEW 2022
(4 February - 5 March)
Xueqin Yi, Image 6, Untitled, 2017, inkjet print
Featuring ten emerging or re-emerging contemporary photographers, VIEW2022 showcases some of the most exciting new artists working in the ACT and surrounding regions. Comprising a PhotoAccess award exhibition accompanied by a publication, VIEW2022 brings together works in analogue and digital photography, installation and moving image. Revealing the energy and spirit of south-eastern Australian contemporary photo-media, the featured artists explore themes including the interplay between media and the queer experience, our relationship to the natural world, and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Curation by Wouter Van de Voorde.
Annette Fisher - Demolition
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Annette Fisher, Demolition, 2021, Inkjet print
In print and video works, Annette Fisher records her fascination with, shock at and delight in a building redevelopment location in Woden town centre in Canberra’s south. Fisher sets out to capture beauty in the abject. Despite the destruction, she sees light coming from the rubble, something of hope. Her works reflect on how, even with humanity’s penchant for destruction, people continue to build from the ashes, to forget and fail to learn, yes, but also to construct anew.
Annette Fisher is an artist and psychotherapist. She graduated with a BVA (Hons) from the Australian National University School of Art andDesign with a major in painting, but has since developed her creative practice in photography and moving image.
Izaäk Bink - I want you, because I can’t have you
Izaäk Bink, Ride Em Cowboy, 2021, digital photocopy
Izaäk Bink, I want you because I can’t have you, 2021, digital photocopy
Drawing on both photographic and print-making processes and traditions, Izaäk Bink’s I want you, because I can’t have you considers the human hardship caused by the concealment defining queer experience. Bink’s use of found images draws attention to the toxic, exaggerated masculinity gay men are often forced to emulate, while the surrounding ciphers critique the damage caused by this discourse, highlighting the hiding, discretion and callousness necessary to life in a queer community.
The layers of the text and imagery emphasise the relationship between what is ‘in front’ and what is ‘behind’, forcing the viewer to ask, ‘Whose place is it to decode this work?’
Izaäk Bink is a Ngunnawal/ Ngambri based artist who scrutinises the centre-focus of queer identity and culture within his work.
Xueqin Yi - Plants Chant
Captured as Xueqin Yi was first falling in love with 35mm film photography, Plants Chant explores the artist’s experience of being healed by plants.
Xueqin developed the series as she wandered around the streets with her camera every day after university, using photography as a form of escape from depression, mundanity and boredom. She became intensely interested in interacting with Nature, deriving excitement from observing plants as they changed over a day and experiencing joy, relaxation and comfort as she touched them.
Xueqin Yi is a Chinese-born, Canberra-based photographer working primarily with analogue processes. She graduated from the University
of Canberra in 2021 with a Bachelor of Art in Architecture. VIEW2022 is Xueqin’s first exhibition.
Tom Campbell - not that hill as a site of dominion
Tom Campbell, not that hill as a site of dominion, 2021, Single channel split-screen video
Comprising a split-screen video work telling two simultaneous stories, Not that hill as a site of dominion explores the relationship between physical and virtual travel and the emotional and social consequences of thwarted longing.
Part of an on-going investigation, the work considers how border closures induced by global crises such as climate change are in many ways preventing people’s attempts to connect with family and place, even as internet connectedness means we have more opportunity to establish and maintain links.
Tom Campbell is a Kadazan-Australian artist, whose families travelled to Canberra from England, Scotland and Sabah Borneo, by way of nipaluna/Hobart. Campbell grew up mostly on Ngunnawal land but as a teenager also spent time overseas in Israel/Palestine. Campbell’s practice employs various forms of the spoken and written voice through textiles, writing, sound and performance.
Jemima Campey - That’s All I Have To Say & Crocodile Tears
Jemima Campey, Crocodile Tears, 2021, digital video
In two related works, That’s All I Have To Say and Crocodile Tears, Campey investigates the phenomenon of the ‘apology video’. The artist observes how this increasingly prevalent phenomenon is disrupting divisions between public and private and re-shaping the nature of emotions in contemporary culture.
Campey explores how the spread of social media, the rise of cancel culture and the commercialistion of the self have transformed apologies from personal statements of regret into scripted and staged performances. These events are designed to minimise damage to a ‘personality’s’ brand through an assertion of authenticity and sincerity.
Jemima Campey (Ngunnawal/Ngambri lands) makes photographs, performances, installations and video works. Through the use of appropriated imagery borrowed from a day-to-day context in social media and archival materials, she touches various overlapping themes and strategies, such as performance, memory, and contemporary culture.
Isaac Kairouz - Hek! BIDEO
In Hek! BIDEO, Isaac Kairouz combines video, collage, clay sculpture and painting to create an imaginative, playful installation.
Centred on exploring intersectional experience – the ways in which different aspects of a person’s varied social identities combine to locate them within structures of privilege, – Hek! BIDEO considers the interplay between technology and queered processes of identity construction.
Isaac Kairouz is an interdisciplinary, Canberra- based artist. In 2020, he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and was awarded the Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship. The previous year, he graduated from the Australian National University School of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Visual Arts.
Greg Stoodley - Small Worlds
Greg Stoodley, Greg & Orbit, 2021, Silver Gelatin Print
Greg Stoodley, Cat TV, 2021, Silver Gelatin Print
In Small Worlds, Stoodley explores the relationship between the photographic image and temporality, responding to photography’s capacity to halt time.
Observational in temperament and influenced by the experienced constraints and escapes of the COVID era, Stoodley’s works reflect on the ever decreasing spaces we inhabit.
Greg Stoodley graduated from Canberra Institute of Technology with an Advanced Diploma and the prize for Highest Overall Achievement in Photography in 2014, and from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Photomedia) in 2021. From 2015-2019, Stoodley was the photographer at the Royal Australian Mint, and he was a finalist in the AIPP ACT Emerging Photographer of the Year in 2016 and 2017.
Fiona Bowring - Spoonville
Fiona Bowring, Spoonville, 2022, inkjet print
During the Australian Capital Territory’s 2021 COVID lockdown, Fiona Bowring took her camera for daily walks through previously unexplored parts of her local area. In the liminal spaces between houses and curbs, she saw and photographed aspiration and abandonment, households starting out, growing up, ageing in place. Evidence of whimsy in these landscapes attracted Bowring most of all, with the artist capturing the Zeitgeist in Spoonville.
Fiona Bowring is a Canberra-based photographer who gets out of town whenever she can. She describes her photography as having two genres: portraits with people and portraits without people.
Bowring has been a finalist in the Martin Kantor Portrait Prize, Head On Festival (Landscape) and Canberra Design Festival’s Sweet Suburbia Photography Competition.
Catherine Feint - Childhood Home
Contesting photography’s oft-cited ‘truth claim’ – the idea that the medium represents and preserves the world as it is – Feint sets out to reveal the photographer as the ultimate manipulator of reality.
In Childhood Home, the artist presents a series of images of the house in which she grew up. Her process begins with a series of detailed plans and sketches, which are subsequently produced as small cardboard models and captured on film.
Catherine Feint is a photographer and designer based in Canberra. Feint’s photographic work focuses primarily on the relationship between photographer and photograph, exploring the camera as a tool tocreate individual representations of the world. Her practice draws on similarities between photography and other media such as painting,and attends to revealing the illusion of reality.
Wendy Dawes - Suspension
Suspension is an on-going project questioning the interaction between the contemporary archive of collective and individual memory.
Each work references a short video of an aspect of Dawes’ life, part of her archive of private memories. Using the rotoscope technique and drawing with charcoal on suspension files, the artist traced successive ‘frames’ of moving image segments. Each drawing was photographed, then erased and drawn over, with Dawes finally re-producing each sequence of images as a stop-motion animation.
Wendy Dawes is a Canberra-based artist working primarily with printmedia, investigating individual and collective memory and the fallibility of both. Recently completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Printmedia and Drawing), Dawes explores and responds to the materiality of paper, frequently using the fold as a trope for the making, keeping, obscuration and loss of memory.