Suburban Sombre at Noosa Regional Gallery
Noosa Regional Gallery Director Michael Brennan previews upcoming photographic exhibitions shining a light on the everyday.
The suburbs – perhaps unfairly – get a bit of a bad rap. Don’t get me wrong – I grew up there, and I don’t particularly want to go back.
I guess it’s the relative sameness of the sprawl – letterboxes, nature strips, driveways, SUVs – wait a minute – I’ve got three out of four of those.
Anyway, I’m sure you get what I mean. The thing is, this belt of buildings that surround our cities gets cast with a kind of ubiquitous haze. I guess that’s why when something different happens, it really stands out.
Bill Henson grew up there too. In Glen Waverley, in fact. But as one of Australia’s preeminent photographic artists, his works are anything but monotonous and uniform, even when his subject matter explores these very spaces.
The Light Fades but the Gods Remain presents two bodies of work by the artist that explore the notion of belonging and home through a uniquely dramatic and melancholic lens. The portraits are dark; they’re meant to be to capture the sombre mood of the subject.
In adjacent spaces, audiences are reminded of Henson’s earlier project, the Untitled 1985–86 series, which captures the developing and evolving suburb of his childhood, re-presented alongside a more recently commissioned revisiting of the theme. The two series cast a romantic interplay of beguiling light and romantic shadow across the emerging tiled roof tops and soon-to-be-developed paddocks of this once-middle-Australian suburb.
Interspersed with wistful portraits of adolescent girls and details of ancient architecture, the room is filled with a sense of transience, trouble, and longing.
In an adjoining exhibition space, Queensland-based artist, Kellie O’Dempsey, extends on this sense of loss and the weight of its presence with an installation that gives visual form to the experience of what takes place between dying and death.
Drawing on personal experience, O’Dempsey’s project reveals the tension and drama that plays out behind closed doors as a caretaker of the memories and objects of another. She Does (working title) brings these objects into the gallery, restaging parts of the space in which a person of personal significance lived, exploring the complex fragility and intimacy – coupled with monotony and exhaustion – wrapped up in handling the life of another following an event that will happen to us all, only once.
O’Dempsey’s installation brings together both video and performance alongside the actual objects of this recently reframed domestic space, also laying bare the often unseen labour of women in this space and the value of care versus capital.
BILL HENSON : THE LIGHT FADES BUT THE GODS REMAIN
Runs from 2 December 2023 to 18 February 2024
Check out Noosa Regional Gallery’s other upcoming exhibitions and events.
