IN FOCUS

Peter Abrahams
Wendy Anderson
David Austen
Andrew Bick
Yvonne Kyriakides
Elizabeth Magill
Terry Smith

15 April - 7 May 2005

IN FOCUS is an exhibition of photographic works by seven artists whose primary practice lies in other media. The show brings together an installation and video artist, painters and artists who make books, revealing how they use the medium of photography.
Encompassing video stills, prints, Polaroids and two bookworks IN FOCUS reveals a free flowing approach to the medium. For some artists such as David Austen and Elizabeth Magill, who are both prolific photographers, it is a ‘second instrument’, running parallel or as a source for painting. For other artists such as Andrew Bick and Terry Smith, it can be a form of note taking in images that can be recorded, considered and extended. In book form it allows a time based sequencing of image and text, which Bick in Variant and Yvonne Kyriakides in My Czech Grandmother use to different ends.

Peter Abrahams and Wendy Anderson are abstract painters whose practice involves a consideration of the quality and texture of the painted surface, yet their approach to using a photographic medium is very different. Abrahams’ diptych works combine two ‘found’ images, one of a real time moment, the other a more abstracted ‘still life’, while Anderson’s small Polaroids use a found image as the support for a more visceral intervention of painted lattices and patterns.
Elsewhere connections occur in a use of subject matter that is taken in different directions. Yvonne Kyriakides’s artist’s book combines her own text with a sequence of 30 black and white photographs - a work which evolved from a single chance image the artist caught of her own shadow. In a clear reference to Chuck Close Terry Smith’s work Closer employs a sequence of twelve digitally manipulated prints which together show the artist’s face - a reading that is brought in and out of focus, subverted by the pixilated images.

IN FOCUS is curated by Emma Hill and Terry Smith.