ARCHIVAL JELLY
Stacks Projects, Kings Cross
Damian Dillon and Nina Juniper
15th August – 1st September 2019
Archival Jelly explores the dislocated edges of Australia’s landscape – specifically the urban/nature divide through the copy/archive. Print based processes are utilised to engage with repetition to both degrade and magnify the spectrality of these spaces as viewed through the lens of pictorial representation.
Nina Juniper focuses specifically on urban construction and reconstruction sites and their associated temporary support structures that have become a dominant visual part of the contemporary city-scape. Her print-based practice concentrates on the translation of these transitional architectural sites through abstracted pictorial representations, offering a renewed context for the viewer to engage with the aesthetics of urban temporal environments. By working with industrial materials found in construction; plywood, treated pine, compressed fibre cement and concrete, these works explore valuations of subordinate materials and the work reminds us that built environments are always at the same time unbuilding environments.
Damian Dillon’s series Nowhere fast, enacts a Lynchian landscape where motorways survey the ‘urban nature’ divide. The works breach the cloistered gaze of the road flaneur by using frameworks that draw on the uncanny - to produce an archive of the rupture of the land (by man). Images are taken through chemical processes to dissolve the abject boundary between object and subject, to confuse both the colonised subject, and the implicated viewer. Nowhere fast engages with affect as propagated on the landscape and draws on current writings by Susan Best (2016) as well as Derrida’s Archive Fever (1996) to consider how “Australia as ‘settled’ territory is paradoxically experienced as unsettled and unsettling.” (McCarthy,2006)
All images Document Photography.