Silent, Empty, Waiting for the Day

This installation comprised a series of photographs of suburban scenes and a large, floor-based structure. The raised, wooden, floating platform, covering the entire gallery floor, presents as a stage upon which the exhibition is mounted and where the act of viewing is performed. Concepts of construction and performance carry through both the installation and photographic elements of this work. The 6 photographic images shown as part of this exhibition explore the notion of landscape as a cultural construct, a scene to be pictured, framed and defined by our relationship to it. The act of viewing is depicted in one photograph, 'The Wordless Exchange', by a solitary figure, a common motif in classical landscape painting. In the other images a process of entropy is at work in the neglected and abandoned spaces depicted. A domestic interior, a backyard, a public park; environments that were once ordered and animated through human presence, tend slowly towards disorder. The juncture between the man-made and natural worlds sets the scene for this installation. The banal spaces, which form the subject of the photographs, appear as staged compositions, which relate in both material form and metaphor to the wooden structure from which one views these photographic images. The diptych, 'Fallen Leaves & Shadows I & II', presents two views of a run down backyard on a dank autumn afternoon, where splintered wood juts out from a broken fence. The wooden structure that forms the basis of this installation reflects the broken down materials that once demarcated the domestic boundaries featured in these images. The acoustic qualities that resonate from this wooden structure as the viewer moves from one image to another, further highlights the act of 'looking'. The photographic works included as part of this installation were: 'A Complex Variety of Greens (from Emerald to Viridian)' (2011), 'Silent, Empty, Waiting for the Day' (2011), 'Stagnant Pool' (2010), 'The Wordless Exchange' (2010), 'Fallen Leaves & Shadows I & II' (2011) diptych, each measuring 122 cm x 152 cm, colour lightjet photographic prints. Edition of three.