Wednesday, August 29, 2012

MGA  exhibition, Abstractions in Photography, had a huge response from photographers. This Exhibit shows selected photographs from approximately 2 500 entries – the largest number received in the history of Australia’s most coveted Browness photography prize. 42 photographers are selected as finalists.

For me, this exhibit reveals much juxtaposition in society, quirky, odd elements in our lives, some clever images direct from nature depicting mystery, questions, or design elements seen by the photographers eye and some are deliberately set up to tell a story. Much of it reflects deep thought, rather than just happy snaps of nice things.

David's exhibition at the Walker Street Gallery was inspiring and interesting. The impact was immediate, with large canvases of color, movement, interesting shapes, video screens, and sounds. Ambiguous imagery created with a combination of digital art & oils invited the viewer to stop and figure out what the content was depicting, layers upon layers of photographic  images cleverly rendered, texture, color and paint creatively applied to make up an intriguing presentation. I would say my favorite was the big red multi panel labelled FluxV. This piece had lots of red, a lot of movement, people, traffic, as if a busy life of people coming and going to and from work or some destination in their focus, all blurred together into a deceptively pleasant image to ponder. David's intent appeared to cause one to question the world as we know it, the information we are fed through the media etc, on issues like the environment, finances, terrorism, disease such as cancer, the confusion and fear that can be caused by all of this. It seems his ideas behind the exhibition  are to make the viewer think and decide what is right for him or herself, rather than just believe out rightly what we are told. I was impressed.