This stimulating new exhibition of landscape photography celebrates the unique grandeur of the Australian natural environment while exploring the complex readings of 'land' in our multicultural, postindustrial country. Embracing a wide diversity of photo-media, from colour prints and lightbox installation to stereoscopy and virtual panorama, these works delight the eye, stimulate the imagination and challenge preconceptions.

Addressing both implications of the exhibition title, these artists explore the insight that can be gained by engaging with the distinct topography of the Australian landscape, whilst also looking beyond the romanticised notions of landscape inherited from a European tradition of fine art painting. Here landscape is a place to recover hidden histories, challenge notions of beauty and make startling leaps of imagination.

The Artists

Gary Weber (NSW)
Untitled 1999-2000
type C prints

"To see the World in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour." William Blake

Gary Weber is a respected nature photographer based in Newcastle. In these simple yet elegant images of tree bark, he suggests the colour and scale of the Australian landscape within the microcosm of surface detail. Rather than attempt to represent the vastness of the Australian interior, he draws us in to the world of the miniature, to see through the surface to a landscape of the imagination which is, none-the-less uniquely Australian.

Pamela Lofts (NT)
Untitled series 1996-99
type C prints

"I am drawn to these places and pushed away� each trip the country works its magic slithering under my skin with a shiver of anxiety and desire." Pamela Lofts

Pamela Lofts is an installation artist living in Alice Springs, in the Central Australian desert. Her work is informed by personal experience, creating a position from which to consider the layering of cultural, political, environmental and historical issues specific to living in Central Australia. These miniature works document often large-scale temporary installations made in the landscape. Prior to her art studies she collaborated with Aboriginal storytellers to research, design and produce animated films and a series of children's books. Her installations reflect a culturally plural sensibility played out with the affecting simplicity of a childlike imagination - aesthetically direct but conceptually ambiguous.

Heather Winter (QLD)
Double Helix 1997
light boxes

Heather Winter has worked for a number of years around the idea of landscape. She lived for 15 months with the Ngarinyin people of the Kimberley region of Western Australia, an experience which had a profound influence on her ideas and her work. In Double Helix she takes images of the Kimberley horizon and arranges them into grids using digital technology. The grids are reorientated from horizontal to vertical, suggesting the body or its parts: a spinal cord, strands of hair or the double helix of the DNA molecule, from which the work derives its title. In doing so, the artist is attempting to reflect the Aboriginal concept of land as inextricably entwined with the individual and their kinship relation to others - a complex and subtle concept at odds with the European immigrant notion of land as territory to be conquered and possessed.

The artist acknowledges her debt to the Ngarinyin teacher Mowaljarlai in the making of this work.

Juha Tolonen (WA)
Wittenoom 1999-2000
type C prints

Juha Tolonen's documentation of the Pilbara region to the north of Perth contrasts the last vestiges of the once thriving asbestos-mining town of Wittenoom with the natural splendour of the neighbouring Karajini National Park. Following the closure of the CSR mine and successful litigation against the company that found it liable for a number of cases of asbestos-related disease, there was an attempt to close down the town. A government plan had proposed moving the town away from the harmful asbestos and redeveloping it as a tourist centre serving the national park. The proposal for New Wittenoom did not go ahead and the original town was virtually demolished, despite the protests of residents. The tourism that was intended to have saved Wittenoom was directed to the other side of the Karajini National Park while the former mine remains on the periphery, just out of sight, and out of mind. The new industry of tourism, which markets landscape as spectacle, does not sit comfor! tably with the morally compromised industrial practices of the past.

Cath Bowdler (NT)
Scott Creek 1996
installation

The installation at Scott Creek Station, a cattle property 70 kilometres west of Katherine, NT, took place over a six-month period in 1996. It can be seen as an intervention into the landscape and as a metaphor for our intrusion into this environment - an environment that is both fragile and oppressive. The work is deliberately ambiguous: enticing and incongruous. The imported forms, shaped like alien pods or tiny boats are fashioned from the ubiquitous settler material, galvanised iron. The boats serve as triggers to our collective memories, suggesting the foreign impositions on the landscape created by European immigrants. During the passage of the six months that the boats were installed, the occupants of the termite mounds, the effects of the weather and the environment itself reclaimed the site. The installation documents this reclamation set against the climatic shift from monsoonal wet to the long grass of the dry season.

Jason Davidson Hampton (NT)
In Memory of Our Ancestors R.I.P. 2001
digital prints

"The destruction of culture and country is like a deep wound that can only be healed by reconnecting with culture and country." Jason Davidson Hampton

Jason Davidson Hampton is a young Indigenous artist from Darwin. He won a Quantum Grant in 2000 to develop a project involving computer technology & photography skills, graphic designing and narration in the re-telling of stories from the East Kimberley. Working with technology to take to the broader community the stories about some of the massacres that took place in the early 1900s. In this new gallery work here, made especially for Seeing Through Landscape, he unfolds the story of Mistake Creek in East Kimberley, where, between 1915 and 1920, 35 Aboriginal people were killed and their bodies burned to hide the evidence. The series of nine images present attractive scenes of a Boab tree and the bushland around it, typical representations of Australian landscape. But the text that frames each image cuts through the aesthetic appreciation of the scene as landscape, to deliver the terrible story that lies within the place.

Phillip George (NSW)
Esperanto of Vision and Temple 2001
laser type C prints

Phillip George's vast panorama documents Little Bay, near the entrance to Botany Bay in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Little Bay is the site of parallel histories: the Aboriginal history of the Gwyeagal and Kameugla peoples who have lived there for over twenty millennia; the colonial history of nearby La Perouse, named after the French explorer who arrived in Botany Bay just four days after the First Fleet, and contemporary art history when, in 1969, Christo wrapped the bay in a million square feet of fabric. Taking the notion of Little Bay as the point of arrival and departure for different histories and cultures, Phillip George created Esperanto of Vision. The cultural icons and artefacts that lurk within the scene suggest a synthetic history akin to Zamenhof's invented international language - an artificial hybrid tongue based on the principle languages of Europe and named after 'one who hopes'. The lush panorama conjures a landscape of what might have been, had the ancient c! ultures of the northern hemisphere, whose descendants contribute to the ethnic plurality of contemporary Sydney, arrived millennia before.

Ian North (SA)
Correlations 1997
acrylic on cibachrome

"The Correlations are history paintings which acknowledge their own impossibility." Ian North

In an age of globalisation, Ian North's Correlations address the paradox of the representation of the Australian landscape while maintaining its regional distinctiveness. The works incorporate representations of landscape from a number of sources and periods: romantic paintings by George Lambert and Arthur Streeton from the 1920s, 'Australia beautiful' photographs by Frank Hurley from the 1950s and photographs by the artist taken near Tibooburra, NSW and Lake Eyre, SA. These images were combined with the aid of computer. The final print was then over-painted with a series of gestural arcs which both link and obfuscate the disparate visions of the Australian landscape which lie beneath. Art here is a reflection of social history rather than natural topography; of successive attempts to contain and idealise the Australian landscape which are as ambivalent as they are locally specific.

Martin Walch (TAS)
Untitled 2001
colour transparencies, stereo viewers and crates

"Martin Walch is currently producing some of the most exciting visual and cognitive research in the visual arts - not just in Australia, but globally." Peter Hill

Martin Walch's installation presents a series of stereoscopic images of mining along the western coastline of Tasmania. Installed within boxes that suggest the crates for surveying equipment, the scenes glow seductively, enticing the viewer to look more closely, more intimately. This is a complex project - part experiment, part obsessive love affair. His images do not offer a simple binary: nature = beautiful; industry = ugly. Rather they suggest the enfolding of environmental experience into an ever-evolving landscape, which is neither good nor bad, but simply is.

Patricia Piccinini (VIC)
Horizon 1998
DVD installation

"The digital horizon displaces the horizon of traditional global trade and travel, promising calm seas, too perfect to be real." Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini has established an international reputation for her images and interactive programs which explore the nature of the artificial and the siren song of the synthetic. Horizon is a computer-generated seascape in which, despite the motion of the sea, the lapping of the waves and the sparkle of the sun, never progresses to noon or dusk. It is an endless moment in time.

As a conclusion to this exhibition it is a meditative space in which to consider the relation of the synthetic to our notions of the idealised landscape. Is the perfect calm of this never-ending sunset any more synthetic than the romantic representation of Australia through the tradition of European painting of the Heidelberg School, or the graphic reduction of Uluru to the formula of a picture postcard?

The Australian Centre for Photography is funded jointly by the Australia Council and the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts

Australian Centre for Photography 257 Oxford Street Paddington NSW 2021 tel: (02) 9332 1455 fax: (02) 9331 6887 email: [email protected]

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