Set Up

15 May - 15 June 2003 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Wayne Barrar, Jenny Gillam, Ben Cauchi, Mary Macpherson

With photographs from four new bodies of work, this exhibition explores the concept of staged worlds. Both Jenny Gillam and Ben Cauchi are interested in photography’s role in history making. Re-photographing 1940s portraits of ordinary men and women assuming movie star poses, Gillam explores how photography enables people to imagine themselves and, in turn, to be imagined. Ben Cauchi also re-stages the past, constructing and preserving scenarios using 19th century photographic methods.

In a series called At Sea Mary Macpherson constructs tiny stage sets out of junk shop maritime paintings, lace and plastic toys, photographing them to evoke the sea as a site for adventure and imagination. This convergence of reality and fiction is continued in Wayne Barrar’s photographs of Woomera and Coober Pedy in South Australia, where interiors carved into caves, museum exhibits and landscapes all evoke a strange version of reality.

Rebecca Wilson