The first thing we do when encountering a photograph is seek to contextualise it, preferably with a concise, reassuring caption. Severed from this, we at least want to know provenance, or authorship, or date, anything to pin down the reality underlying the skein of pixels. None of the three sequences in this show provide us with any of this information. We can guess, extrapolate or try to match by visual similarity, but we cannot know.
The blank space of the fine art gallery seeks to excise the photograph from its context, and we can be willing to play that game so long as we are clear about authorship and preferably have some idea of intent. These are both grey areas here - the artist did not take these photographs, but the photographers are either dead or obscured by time and in any case discarded these images. Who owns them? Is their creator's intent brought into an objective focus or erased by this re-use? With this body of work, Orchison is wiggling a couple of fingers into the crack opened by Jacky Redgate's rephotography of flea-market cartes-visites.
The diffuse, slippery character of this body of images indicates a fundamental dysfunction in the role of photographs as solidified memories: without their captions they become solidified amnesia. The images are nostalgic in tone both for their battered texture and period content but considering the lack of context, it's nostalgia for what? An indeterminate time in an unspecified place? Somewhere else, someplace good?
Is this your idea of a holiday?
I want it anyway.
- Underground Lovers
During a field trip to the decomissioned Waterloo Incinerator (now soon to be demolished to make way for the Green Square town center) with Col James and a group of young artists, we examined the space for its potential as artists' studios and exhibition spaces. In a heavily vandalised office on an upper floor, the windows having been broken and the furniture smashed at some point in the distant past, we found a scene like the wake of a tornado. Amongst the garbage that had been blowing around the room for a decade or more I found a set of ruined negatives in a dried puddle.
I scanned them at high resolution, dirt and all, and found a texture like Japanese rice paper and stains like gouts of blood. The photographs were mainly wobbly landscapes shot with one hand, horizons tilting crazily; some of them featured distant figures, sunglasses shadowing their eyes into blank sockets. My best guess is they were holiday snaps taken around Shoal Bay during the early 1980s, but by whom? The sequence gives no apparent narrative, and there are no portraits, only distant figures.
These are the dissociative aides-memoire of a total stranger, degraded by time and weather to the point of utter unrecognisability. They were badly shot, cheaply processed, discarded and then vandalised, and yet there is an insistent unsettling beauty in them, like a flowering weed pushing through a pavement.
7 images, editions of 3, Colorspan Giclée print on uncoated whole-sheet Hanemühle 300 paper with hand-dyed deckle, 106 x 85.5 cm.
Ain't nothing gonna harm me in my golden years
Every day, I search for more shrapnel in my flesh
Didn't they tell you I was OK?
Did anyone tell you that I'm fine
I'm fine
- Paradise Motel
Like the amnesiac book dealer in Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" I have spent several months poring over a trove of ancient pictures - a suitcase full of family photographs my mother brought back from South Africa, some dating back as far as the early 1880s. Many of these were taken by persons unknown on dates unknown of subjects unknown. In my hands they seemed to form relationships to one another, but these are probably illusions. The images are full of emotion and energy and drama but there is no-one left alive who remembers when they were taken or why. Like the Incinerator Holiday, these images are mnemonic devices forever severed from the memories they served. I have laboriously hand coloured them based on guesswork and whim, sometimes cheekily slipping in colour details that suggest very different readings to the ones we might reach by logic and detective work.
9 images, editions of 3, Colorspan Giclée print on uncoated whole-sheet Hanemühle 300 paper with hand-dyed deckle, 106 x 85.5 cm.
What were the skies like when you were young?
- The Orb
Nothing is more generically recognisable yet more specifically ephemeral than the sky. It is the principal element of a landscape image but the hardest thing to pin down in memory. These are skies I found in the top third of some of the old pictures from the suitcase, hand coloured and adjusted to amplify their textures, dust and scratches evoking the chaos of air raids. They probably date from between the 1930s and the 1950s.
5 images, editions of 5, Colorspan Giclée print on uncoated Hanemühle 300 paper, 21 x 59.4 cm.
This body of work has been made during an intense 12-month battle with serious clinical depression. Without the support and patience of my family and friends it would not have been made at all. There is a myth that the creative personality must always have its demons, that to seek treatment - and medication in particular - for mood disorders is to stifle the creative process. It's a load of rubbish. Time spent demon-wrestling is time spent NOT working, and allowing your judgement of your own work to be swamped with self-critical despair is just as damaging to the quality of your output as self-indulgent uncritical endorsement of every half-arsed sketch. A person who has never experienced pain lacks the insight to be an artist, but so does a person who allows themselves to experience nothing but pain.
There is a school of thought that admitting to suffering any mental illness will be lethal to your cred, your mojo, whatever, and that having survived, it would be best to let sleeping black dogs lie. I don't subscribe to that way of thinking. There are other people out there who are still in the tunnel. To them I say: there IS a light at the end. Help IS available. Take the helping hand when it is offered. This body of work stands as testimony to the power of community. It began to properly take shape when I began to talk to my family, my friends, my doctor, and stopped suffering in silence.
To my family, especially my wife Louise and my parents; and to my friends, especially Michael Brennan, Peter Minter and Kate Fagan; I say thankyou. This show is yours as much as mine. I could not have made it alone.
Kay Orchison
May 10th, 2007
View Somewhere Else, Somewhere Good
Acknowlegements
Somewhere Else, Someplace Good is named after a track on the EP A Strange Holiday by The Dirty Three. I listened to it a lot this year. It kept me afloat from time to time.