GROUP EXHIBITION

Created for the Adelaide Biennale of Art: Magic Object (2016), the photographs in Beyond Landscape explore our relationship with the ‘otherness’ of the natural world. Nature – the world and its matter, whether alive or inert – becomes a magic object in and of itself for Mellor. Lush rainforest vegetation, conjured in the artist’s signature blue palette seduce and entrap the viewer. With Aboriginal and Anglo-Australia heritage, Mellor draws on Western traditions and indigenous cultural perspective to create imagery that suggests multiple ways of approaching the conceptual space of our environment.

New Zealand is a country celebrated for its natural beauty, its vast landscapes appearing on tourist posters and in feature films worldwide. In his Dialogue with Nature series Shanghai-based artist Jin Jiangbo layers his own cultural landscape upon ours, to capture in the shanshui tradition New Zealand’s mountains, oceans and beaches not with ink on paper, but through the lens of a camera. He offers us a reworking of our own landscape through his own heritage, giving it a cultural inflection that allows New Zealanders to look through new cultural eyes - to look afresh at what we thought we knew. Presenting the work in the style of a one-and-a-half-millennia-old tradition, Jin Jiangbo has made the familiar unfamiliar.

With his New Age and The Sanctuary series, Gavin Hipkins presents landscape vistas and fragments of nature, overlaid with buttons, beads and lace, and produced under the seductive guise of pictorial photography. They highlight his interest in the unoccupied landscape as a contested space. An amalgam of photogram and the photograph, The Sanctuary works have connoted calligraphy, animation, ghost traces and the late nineteenth century scientific art of chrono-photography. These series also pay homage to oriental and New Age references. Under this reverent light, the domestic materials Hipkins places on the prints can also be interpreted as worry beads sitting atop of a familiar vernacular landscape: beautiful, romantic, and ultimately, sexualized landscape.

The exhibition also includes Hipkins’ recent video, New Age 2016. Calling on passages from an English spiritualist manual from the 1870s, Hipkins’ video explores the ritual landscape of Avebury’s stone circles. Imagining a solstice celebration with his friends, spiritualism and spirit photography are revisited in the twenty-first century.