Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is delighted to present a group exhibition of photographic and video work in association with the 2011 Head On Photography Festival. The exhibition presents new work alongside iconic pieces by some of Australia’s most distinguished artists working with photography and video. Destiny Deacon’s incisive photographs from 2003/2004 use props, performance and blak humour to undermine racial stereo-types and question the status-quo. Fiona Hall’s large Polaroid photographs of aluminium sculptural reliefs emerged after a residency in New York in which Hall had access to one of only four large-format Polaroid cameras in the world. In this selection of images, domestic objects are abstracted and re-presented and popular spiritualism receives a consumerist twist.

Ten photographs by Bill Henson from the series Untitled 1985/86 (“Suburban/Egyptian”) present urban landscapes and portraits. Images from this series were included in Henson’s major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria in 2005. Tracey Moffatt’s iconic Scarred for life II (1999) hits you in the gut. Full of pathos, the devastating combinations of image and text tell the painful story of growing up. In the small gallery, TV Moore’s haunting video work, Urban Army Man (2000), captures a vagrant dressed in camouflage running down Sydney’s Oxford Street. Shot in night vision, Moore’s character advances endlessly towards the retreating camera. Julie Rrap’s latest body of work, Outerspace (2011), re-presents the (artist’s) body in a state of suspension. Three large photographs and a video work reveal a narrative of ‘otherness’ in which the body occupies space but not place. Anne Zahalka’s uncanny celebrity portraits, The Immortals (2011), were shot at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Los Angeles. Captured in wax and re-captured in film, these characters exist in an eerie realm of the undead. 

Press release courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.