Art Gallery

I've deliberately put off typing this post from paper journal for ages now, because I was a tit and forgot to get the Artist's name. But I have to give in and realize that all my good intentions about returning to properly credit her have gone awry, passed over and forgotten time and again by more pressing things, like smoogling with the boi or yet more home reno stuff (such as this nifty tv room outside on a deck!), so bugger it, I'll post it without her name.

October 24, 2004.

I've a friend visiting from Norway. This is her second visit since I've arived, and also her last, as she's on her way to Tailand and then back home to Norway...so I've been crazy busy trying to show her everything.

It rained all morning, so the default plan was the museum and art gallery. Museum was dissapointing. Art gallery was not. I'd been last here only a few weeks ago, and was delighted to find so many ofthe exhibits are not static ones, and had plenty of new things to contemplate.

I had, on my last trip here, been dissapointed with the aboriginal art section. I had been hoping to be blown away by a large collection of art I'd not be able to see anywhere else in the world. But then, nothing grabbed me. It all hazed into one big similar blob.

Not so this time.

There was a piece by a female artist; digital manipulation, oil, and pastels all added to a pre-exsisting photograph. The pictures themselves she pulls from government archives decades ago. You know the sort of pictures I am talking about. Every country has them. Each cultural drowning seems to be accompanied by the pressing need to document the "transformation" from savage to civillized, contributing member of an higher society.

So a stranger comes into a community, takes hollow, mournfull pictures of the locals, either singly or as a group, all dressed "appropriately", of course, in respectable, taillored clothing.

Such photographs never depict an actual smile. Subject always look morose and uncomfortable. They sit quietly, disjointed, dejected...beaten...as the camera steals yet another piece of their soul.

The eyes always look haunted.

She sees it, too. Capitalizes in her own way on this little rape of her ancestors by reclaiming their essence, taunting the photographer by transforming the photo once more.

She's accentuated the despair of two aboriginal women, posed standing side by side in a faceless studio. Layer upon layer is added to the image. Part of her manipulation includes adding a lonely bleak background; barren harsh landscape that stretches off into the distance, echoing the lonliness. She's painted a delicate trail, like a spideweb, that tracks off over the horizon. The whole thing is then topped with a digital overlay, a misty veil like covering, like a ghost has floated accross the lens.

The end result is creepy, surreal beauty.