Images have a powerful way of revealing connections between disparate histories and experiences. redux is an exhibition that assembles, re-assembles and sequences parallel and divergent narratives, curating archival and recent infra-red and visible light photographs in a way that evokes a pictorial and studied chronology. History repeats itself and redux intimates we are part of those cycles.
It is a reminder as well of the often-violent displacement of Aboriginal people and knowledge systems, with colonial enterprise failing to acknowledge the value of cultural systems embedded in story, Dreaming and Country. The ecological destruction portrayed in many of the images is an uncanny reminder of our current global and environmental impacts, and contrasts acutely with intact rainforest ecologies.
The exhibition is one that emphasises reflection, literally and metaphorically. A selection of photographs is printed on polished mirror steel surfaces, the viewer reflected and brought into the work as witness to changes and experience in and on our landscapes. Other more traditionally presented pieces ask questions through dialectic and considered placement, their relationship and conversation with one another growing a sense of history and connection.
redux aligns the splintered narratives of past and present into an exhibition of both large and intimately scaled photographic works, with landscape and people remembered and acknowledged.
– Danie Mellor, 2022
Installation photography by Andrew Curtis, courtesy Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.
