Exhibition Floor Talk | Terra
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Output Type
Other
Publication Title
Exhibition Floor Talk | Terra
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
School
School of Arts and Humanities; ECU Galleries
Description
Exhibition Statement | Terra is a solo photographic landscape history of Western Australia. At its core is the evidence, demonstrated through a series of photographic narratives, of the destruction of landscape since colonisation as a cultural act (hence the pun in the title). The dead and dying towns, the denuded terrain, the wreckage strewn across that landscape belong to a history that is gormless and ingenuous, brutish and pitiless, surreptitious, dishonest and inevitable.
There are two compelling processes available to historians: one is to tell a story that has so far been lost or otherwise hidden. The other is to shift people’s perspectives so that old ways of thinking are discarded. This exhibition employs both. The panoramas explore the deep time of a landscape shaped by ice ages and fluctuating sea levels. The images depict events that indirectly play into the history of destruction, refusing to reveal meaning but implying that even acts of minor significance are inextricable from others that have dramatic repercussions.
The works are created with film. Analogue cameras impose limitations upon the photographer, obliging him or her to calculate and compose, but the images can also have a rawness and vitality that digital work cannot achieve.
Artist Bio | John Toohey is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, where he lived from 2012 to 2018. His thesis examines landscape history through Edwardian postcards. He has an M.A in Art History and an Honours Degree in History. His experience combines photography and landscape and social history, and recently includes the production of audiowalks, engaging listeners, readers and viewers in appreciating the hidden traces of the city around them.
Toohey has exhibited and published his photographs in Australia and overseas and his work is held in national collections. His books and articles have had international success. In 2019 he won the Lawrence Wilson Art Writing Prize on Ailsa Lee-Brown’s portrait by Adelaide Perry. His book, Strange Encounters, will be published in the UK in early 2024.
Additional Information
Exhibition dates: 7 September to 5 October 2023 | Floor talk: Wednesday 13 September 12:30pm – 1:30pm