Fell
Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga
21.11.2015 - 10.01.16
Fell is an ongoing investigation into the shifting history of industry in regional New South Wales, exploring the struggle between trusting tradition and pursuing progress. It is a broad-ranging attempt at visualizing not only the environment and industries that it supports, but also the collective psyche of the people who exist within these systems, taking place in the southwest slopes of the Great Dividing Range.
The photograph offers the innate ability to make visible the marks and intersections of industry, labour and society. By using found and created photographs, Fell weaves a complex, multifaceted history of an area both dependent upon and in conflict with these seemingly unquestionable relationships. Located at the points where these ideas intersect, overlap and crash together, Fell exemplifies the dangers of believing in neither the future nor the past, but rather remaining hopeful about the stasis of the present.
However, this work is not only an effort to examine these spaces but also acts as an enquiry about the medium of photography and the nature of history. Looking at the possibilities and relationships between storytelling and historicism, and in particular, how the photograph can be constantly repurposed and appropriated into any historical narrative, Fell uses and exploits various methods of display to explore the inconsistency of memory and the uncertainty of looking.
Fell
Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga
21.11.2015 - 10.01.16
Fell is an ongoing investigation into the shifting history of industry in regional New South Wales, exploring the struggle between trusting tradition and pursuing progress. It is a broad-ranging attempt at visualizing not only the environment and industries that it supports, but also the collective psyche of the people who exist within these systems, taking place in the southwest slopes of the Great Dividing Range.
The photograph offers the innate ability to make visible the marks and intersections of industry, labour and society. By using found and created photographs, Fell weaves a complex, multifaceted history of an area both dependent upon and in conflict with these seemingly unquestionable relationships. Located at the points where these ideas intersect, overlap and crash together, Fell exemplifies the dangers of believing in neither the future nor the past, but rather remaining hopeful about the stasis of the present.
However, this work is not only an effort to examine these spaces but also acts as an enquiry about the medium of photography and the nature of history. Looking at the possibilities and relationships between storytelling and historicism, and in particular, how the photograph can be constantly repurposed and appropriated into any historical narrative, Fell uses and exploits various methods of display to explore the inconsistency of memory and the uncertainty of looking.