AFTER IMAGE 1995

After Image, William Mora Galleries, Melbourne, 1995

After Image, Photography is Dead, Long Live Photography at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1996

A video, also called After Image, accompanies this work.

Line positive transparencies, each 1240mm x 920. View more images
ouliana, foreign trader, bulgaria
judy, artist, australia
marina, nurse, russia
yvonne, student,yugoslavia
andrew, historian, australia
dylan, lawyer, australia
edwin, travel agent, puerto rico
moya, writer, australia
gursuran, scientist,india
wendy, manager, barbados
beulah, art student, vietnam
jenny, secretary, australia

Around 1990 I was working a lot with the image of the face, depicted in a away that tried to evoke what I thought of as a 'space in between' (sleeping and waking, breathing and not-breathing, the conscious and the unconscious). I made a series of large diptychs, paintings called smoke - of various people smoking. The phenomenon of breathing interested me more and more, as did the non-scientific idea of the idea of smoke being unverifiable, loose in the air, unable to be seized, like a shadow. These paintings hovered somewhere between photography and painting.

From images of people with their eyes open, I moved on to images of people with their eyes closed (see the Sleep paintings of 1993.) At the same time my work started to literally incorporate 'a space in between', such as in the earliest Invisible Paintings, which were white (negative) paintings on mirrored surfaces that cast the (positive) shadow of the image onto the wall, and the Sleep column works of 1993-94. A new series of work followed on from this, the twelve large transparency prints that make up the still component of After Image. My very early interest in anamorphosis remains, here translated into a possibility that is hinted at through the spaces that exist between the material plane or surface of the work, and its projections onto the wall.