Couldn’t get to Melbourne last month? Fear not, photography photographed…

The experiential film Still Our Country is having its first screening as part of DARK MOFO at Mona in Tasmania. The first iteration of the project for me was the series Football Game! with the seamless interweaving of my stills in this groundbreaking still/motion picture the second. This project is  proving to be a glorious moveable feast with more to come.

The film itself is part of the Charlie’s Country suite of projects by Molly Reynolds and Rolf de Heer both of whom will be down south for a Q&A on July 22.

Click darkly on this link and grab some mofo tickets while you can…

Some fine words from South Australia’s best arts writer…

(Re=Again) The reimagined archaeology of CJ Taylor’s collodion collages

To remember is to remake. Never simple retrieval, memory is a dynamic act of creation every time. Physical and mental, in the act of remembering our brains find the constituent parts assembling them into wholes that hang together well enough for us to call it memory. To believe in these stories at all is an act of faith and yet we do, relying on memory for what we know, for the ‘truth’ of things. CJ Taylor’s collodion collages reimagine photographic time as real time, as memories assembled from the future as much as from the past. As assemblage, memory holds within it a sense of precariousness, the feeling that things are on the cusp of dissolution, that they are composed more of gaps than substance. We seek coherence and wholeness, for things to hold together not to fall apart. And so we collect and recollect, we reconstitute and restore, over and over again insisting on cohesion and resisting fragmentation. We make and re make the world as have seen it and made it before. To re-member is a word of the body and its parts, its members. To disassemble the word itself, to re-member is to put back together, as to dismember is to take apart. To re- member is to restore the body to the integrity of its whole self. And when this drive towards cohesion is resisted, these acts of re-membering forestalled as here with the body of a kangaroo fragmented and reconstituted but not quite, put back together off kilter, we are forced to inhabit the spaces between. Transparency, overlay, a visual archaeology of a time we have not yet seen. It is in the gaps and interstices, in these dynamic processes of this fragmentation and putting back together, this remembering that possibility resides. When we look past the familiar into the between, to remember can be to remake anew.

Jemima Kemp 2014

Well I know I have a vested interest but this show really is a cracker. The opening was a cracker, fab and diverse turnout with some of the greatest responses both then and after with the sister show at the SA State Library working beautifully. Haarty congrats to the curator Amalia Ranisau and our thanks to Mark Kimber for many rousing words. Having just returned from Canberra where I spruiked the work and show both at a conference and around the traps the wows keep on a-coming. Really, I don’t know of anywhere else where these original photographic processes are being used in such original ways and then being brought together in such a contemporary conversation.