Four international artists who work in constructed photography will feature in an exhibition opening at The University of Queensland Art Museum on Saturday 1 March.
The exhibition is a highlight of the Queensland Festival of Photography 5.
The No Place exhibition features photographs by the USA’s James Casebere and Lori Nix, China’s Yao Lu and Italy’s Giacomo Costa.
UQ Art Museum Director Dr Campbell Gray said exhibition curator Gordon Craig had brought together artists who constructed photographic images using physical and digital studios.
Dr Gray said the artists’ works revealed questions about contemporary and future worlds.
“As viewers, we are drawn into urban and wild places that veer from manicured suburbs to futuristic cities in decay,” he said.
“While we may marvel at the extraordinary environments these artists construct – either as table-top models or digitally – conceptually their photographs bear witness to often unsettling utopian and dystopian visions.”
New York’s James Casebere has been at the forefront of constructed photography with large-scale photographs based on complex architectural models.
His series Landscape with houses, Dutchess County, NY 2009 depicts aerial views of an American suburban dream, in which individual ambitions for a big house on a big block are pitched against underlying realities of mortgage stress and suburban isolation; a vision of utopia that is skin-deep.
Lori Nix, based in Brooklyn, makes elaborate dioramas and photographs them with a large-format camera. She avoids digital manipulation.
Nix’s The City series features apocalyptic scenes in which grand public institutions and a local laundromat are presented as sites in ruin overrun by nature.
Beijing-based Yao Lu, who studied at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art, produces photographs that resemble traditional Chinese landscape paintings.
However, close examination reveals his images to be constructed with green mesh dust-screen – used on Chinese building sites – draped over piles of rubble or land-fill. His photographs are then assembled digitally.
Yao Lu’s New Landscapes series highlight the environmental damage accompanying China’s rapid urbanisation.
Italian artist Giacomo Costa, who represented Italy at the 2009 Venice Biennale, produces large-scale photographs that are inspired by science fiction and disaster movies.
They explore the self-destructive potential of humankind in what he describes as the “reckless use of land and its resources”.
Costa constructs intricate futuristic images of cities and natural worlds with 3D modelling software used in film and architectural design.
The exhibition runs until 18 May at the UQ Art Museum on the UQ St Lucia Campus.
Media: Exhibition Curator/UQ Art Museum Exhibition Coordinator Gordon Craig, 07 3346 8762, g.craig@uq.edu.au; UQ Art Museum Associate Director (Curatorial) Michele Helmrich, 07 3346 8759, 0418 754 983, m.helmrich@uq.edu.au; or UQ Art Museum Digital Communications Officer Sebastian Moody (Monday to Thursday), 07 3346 8761, s.moody@uq.edu.au.
**High-resolution images are available for download here
