Starting on the 18th of July and running to the 31st of July, you can view my new exhibition at the Linton and Kay Galleries in Subiaco. I have created twenty five new pieces exclusively for the space that are all limits of only one. As some of you know I am very interested in urban spaces and the art man can create unknowingly when building these spaces. It takes some serious looking at times to find the composition but that search is what makes shooting this style of work so rewarding. Scenes we drive past every day and never give a send glance to, spaces that are so perfect compositionally but banal in their subject are rich fodder to me. I think I can be more excited by a skip bin in a back alley than photographing a waterfall in Yosemite.
A Different View is my most recent work and is focussed primarily on scenes that I find interesting. It isn’t about my usual landscape imagery, it is work that is more personal to me. I find urban spaces and man altered landscapes fill me with feelings of nostalgia. Not all of these spaces, the new bright coloured shopping malls leave me cold, but the old corner stores, the bad 70’s and 80’s architecture, the back streets in old suburbs remind me of my time growing up in Perth. As I age I want to be reminded of this. Am I becoming an old fart, reminiscing about how it was better in my day or is it the things I remember about being young and care free that are important?
I remember road trips to distant beaches in Mandurah and the south west, catching up with cousins to play cricket whilst the parents would eat, get drunk and laugh. When getting a twin pole on the way home from the beach covered in sand and still in our towels was as good as it gets, peeling skin from a long hot summer. All these memories come back to me when I photograph these places. Sometimes it is just the smell of coastal scrub that takes me back other times it is an old Coke sign or sea containers piled high down at Fremantle harbour. Our lives are a mix of experiences, smells, sights, adventures, friends, I want to hang on to these experiences for they are records of who I am.
The opening night is on Thursday the 21st of July, 6-8pm. I hope I will see you there. For a look at all the pieces in the show go to the Linton and Kay website.