Interference Pattern
with Rebecca Najdowski
8 July 2022 to 18 September 2022
Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
15 December 2018 - 24 February 2019
Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Horsham
March 23 – 14 April 2018
Perth Centre for Photography, Perth
What does it mean to make landscape photographs today? Rebecca and Vivian share an interest in critiquing the ways photography constructs our perceptions of nature through the concept of landscape.
Rather than making photographs of the world they explore the possibilities of making photographs with the world. Dismantling the indexical links between subject and image their work promotes a non-hierarchical approach to photography where the photographic materials, camera, photographer and subject-matter are active participants. Their artwork is formed through studio and darkroom interventions of straightforward landscape imagery. Rebecca has mined her archive of negatives and manipulated their structure — cutting, scratching, burning, tearing, stapling, folding— to give a sense of additive-erasure and drawing attention to how photographs frame nature. Vivian primarily uses re-photography however adds further disruption to this process through visual obstructions to the lens such as crystals and mirrors as well as introducing movement of the prints during long exposure. The results are landscape images largely untethered from any identifiable location but resonant with the site and performance of making.
Interference Pattern challenges the conventions of landscape photography by bringing the work of these two artists together to form new temporal images – landscapes in flux. No longer strictly representational, these photographs instead speak of the apparatus of image and meaning making that makes up photography today. Their collaboration is informed by the scientific feminism of Karen Barad, whose diffractive methodology measures “interference patterns” — the effects of difference rather than the differences themselves. Like intersecting ripples made by two rocks thrown into a pond, these differences interact — some intensifying and some negating the other. A site-specific installation of manipulated photographic prints, the exhibition itself operates as an interference pattern. It maps the effects of two artists working in complementary and contrasting ways and opens up possibilities for new materialist pathways through photography.
Below is a selection of Vivian's work as well as installation images from Monash Gallery of Art.
