REARCHAEOLOGY OF THE BUSH
From the Moriendo Renascor 2014 exhibition:
(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
Rearcheology of the bush (coat) (2014), ‘Acrylotypes’, wet plate collodion emulsion on acrylic, 22 panels, unique edition.
Rearcheology of the bush (arms) (2014), ‘Acrylotypes’, wet plate collodion emulsion on acrylic, 12 panels, unique edition.
Rearcheology of the bush (revolutions per minute) (2014), ‘Acrylotype’, wet plate collodion emulsion on acrylic, 1 panel 10cm diameter, gramophone, 78rpm record, jardinière stand, unique edition.
Rearcheology of the bush (death of a doe) (2014), ‘Acrylotypes’, two wet plate collodion emulsion on acrylic, each panel 18cm x 18cm, steel armatures, unique edition.
Rearcheology of the bush (kangaroo) (2014), ‘Acrylotypes’, two wet plate collodion emulsion on acrylic, each panel 18cm x 18cm, steel armatures, unique edition.
The series was first shown at Moriendo Renascor, SASA Gallery Adelaide, May 20 – July 11, 2014, in part at Shimmer Biennale of Photography 2014, SA,The Alchemists, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 2015, SOA+D Gallery,Canberra, 2017 and SALA Festival 2023, Adelaide.
