“Nowhere is a place.” – Paul Theroux
Atopia is a series of 30 colour photographic Giclée prints on uncoated Hanemuhle etching paper at 78.5cm2. They were shot on chemical 120 roll film using a Soviet toy camera, the Lubitel 166, scanned on a Flextight Precision III and printed on a Colorspan Giclée Printmaker FA. The printing technique was chosen for its archival qualities, vivid colour and hallucinatory dot gain effects - the denser areas of dye-based ink run like watercolours. Many of them have been slightly digitally altered so that spaces unconnected by miles seem contiguous. The works are atopic – being of no place – in a number of ways.
Firstly the series is an exploration of artificial inhospitable environments: places which are utilitarian rather than welcoming, and are usually unpeopled. Seldom visited and little cared for, such sites can often foster entropy on a grander scale than is generally tolerated in more populous environments – thus they are atopic again in the sense of being disregarded.
These spaces are a product of the 20th Century’s abundance of cheap fossil fuels. As many independant experts agree that oil production has peaked or will peak between 2000 and 2010, it may be reasonably assumed that it will become gradually more and more expensive from this year. The coming century will therefore see these places fall further into disrepair as the transport and chemicals which maintain them disappear, and perhaps many of them will be abandoned altogether as the true meaning of the word “unsustainable” becomes clear to industry and agriculture. Thus they may be atopic in a third sense, that of being doomed to abandonment.
Some are already abandoned and are yet to be re-used, making them atopic in the sense of being unpurposed, unclassified space. Many are legally or politically contested, making them atopic in the sense of being no-man’s-land.
Many of them are also geographically isolated, making them atopic in the sense of being in the middle of nowhere.
Finally, they are atopic in that an uncaptioned photograph of an empty, anonymous space lacking easily recognisable landmarks seems as if it could be almost anywhere. This subverts the traditional project of landscape photography: instead of an elegaic exposition of the beauty of a particular place in a particular light, these are terse, even critical remarks on generic kinds of spaces.
The photographs were taken many hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of kilometers apart. They are united only by absences and aporias of the Australian landscape. In a nation which so often culturally defines itself by landscape, these culturally created landscapes define blank spots in our national consciousness.
Atopia was held from 2-21 February 2006 at Blender Gallery, 16 Elizabeth St, Paddington.
View AtopiaAcknowledgements:
Giclée prints made with the generous assistance of Richard Crampton at Digital Print and Copy, College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Slide show Copyright 2005 Bernie Maier (code) and Kay Orchison (specification).
3 October 2005