EITHER, EITHER (EX OFFICIO)

The four year series either,either seeks to collapse time, history, fact and fiction into beautiful new worlds replete with certainty and contradiction. The malleability of time through the simultaneous presentation of still and moving imagery is central to my work within the ‘expanded field’[1] of photomedia.

This work problematises what is real and not real by exploring a peculiarly Australian experience. These nowherescapes are gentle and edgy evocations of the slipperiness of time.

In them there is a reimagining, of people, place and art. They are all linked in their own ways. They challenge notions of reality, fiction, landscape and above all, of time. Time and nature are entwined together in a helical fashion.

The contention of this approach to complicate our perception of time beyond the chronological straightjacket it finds itself relegated to on a daily basis. My research continues to explore the notion that time is ‘collapsible’, constantly unfolding and repeating and that photomedia becomes our most reliable connection to time itself as lived experience.

It is the variability of time and the ‘anxieties’[2] these create that my research is now examining through an investigation of the colonial life and times of Colonel William Light (1786 -1839). The execution of the work contests notions of reality, narrative and history amongst the backdrop of life in South Australian liminal hinterlands.

As Jemima Kemp writes, Taylor,

‘…brings us to an uneasy space where nature meets culture, one where the fragility of the bush is threatened… yet one where this proliferative energy, where nature abundant, beautiful, slippery and resistant pushes back and evades culture’s force.’

Nature resists culture. Nature pushes back.

[1] Baker, George. “Photography’s Expanded Field.” October 114 (2005): 121-40.

[2] Belden-Adams, Kris, Modern time: Photography and temporality, PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 2010, 268 pages.

1818 (2015) Pigment print on archival paper 240 x 80cm

A third figure (2015) Pigment print on archival paper 160 x 77cm

Under (2015) Pigment print on archival paper 150 x 84cm

Sliver of silver #1 (2015) Pigment print on archival paper 60 x 32cm

Sliver of silver #2 (2015) Pigment print on archival paper 240 x 80cm