National Photography Prize 2018

My photographic practice combines analogue techniques and darkroom experimentation to examine connections between the history of photography, landscape and architectural Modernism. The final works I exhibit often exist in series and evolve out of extended field trips to document select locations, often ‘brutal’ landscapes. In the darkroom, I experiment with standard procedures of developing the films and gelatin silver prints to produce photographs that are active and changeable rather than fixed; for example producing photographic black and white prints that change colour over time. In this way, the photographic image becomes an event in itself, not simply the witness to and recorder of places and events

My work is multidisciplinary and research driven and explores ecology, nature, poetic and political ideology through process and form. I investigate how ideas and beliefs have shaped our contemporary world, looking at systems of human interaction relating to time, nature, history and science, often using scientific methodology within art processes.

This body of work comes out of extensive research around plants as ciphers for colonization and changing environments as well as an interest in social media networks providing data for images, citizen science and shifting social space

My work finds origin in the push to explore perceptual boundaries of space in relation to parameters of thought, possibility and consciousness. At the core lies an ongoing engagement with the structure and elusiveness of light, of questions circling materiality, form and the nature and processes of perception.

The works in this series expand my interest in working with photography as a process akin to drawing. There is something at play at this material intersection, a cognitive coupling of mediums, with conceptual and philosophical roots combining drawing and photography at the birth of the earliest imaging technologies. In drawing, form takes hold through carbon, of earth.

Photography finds form through light, electromagnetic radiance, dark point and shadow. What is photography’s potential at this material intersection? These gestural light drawings and material ruptures probe our perceptive limits and yet demand pictorial coherence.

My work offers a spatial and temporal narrative across a set of material investigations generated through a process of ‘gleaning’ landscapes and forms which explore traces, inscriptions and erosions pertaining to measuring time via the medium of photography. As a way of thinking about our experience as it is bound to memory and conflated by the passing of time and the span of geographic separation, my images are intended to appear to be of a certain place, pertaining to something specific and significant - yet the entire premise of their production is to remind us that the very thing we seek to locate and recall is always out of reach.

While the reoccurring element of each work is located within the practice of expanded photography the method by which the work comes together draws largely on finding, fragmenting, translating and reconfiguring material - that is both photographed and found. My various approaches are not only bound to photographic reflexivity but engage with the explicit ways that material objects are encountered, experienced, collected, deciphered, presented or interpreted.

James T. Farley is an artist, curator, and lecturer based in Wagga Wagga, NSW. He completed a PhD at Charles Sturt University in 2017, with his research exploring post photography and the practice of ecological stewardship. James’s practice embraces photography in its expanded form, incorporating experimental processes, environmental collaboration, installation, and artist books, in an ongoing critique of the enduring aesthetic traditions of Western Dualism.

James is interested in muddying the waters of dualistic thinking, to explore the complex middle ground where things are never so easily divided. In this way, his practice is concerned with the interrelated ecological realities of the Anthropocene

James Tylor’s artistic practice examines concepts around cultural identity in Australian contemporary society and social history. He explores Australian cultural representations through his multi-cultural heritage, which comprises Nunga (Kaurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Iberian and Norwegian) Australian ancestry.

James’ artistic practice employs both the physical manipulation of digital photographic printing, such as the manual hand-colouring of digital prints or the application of physical interventions to the surfaces of digital prints, and the historical 19th century photographic process of the Becquerel aguerreotype, used with the aid of modern technology to create new and contemporary Daguerreotypes. Photography was historically used to document Aboriginal culture and the European colonisation of Australia. James is interested in these unique photographic processes to re-contextualise the representation of Australian society and history

The artist is Australian, Mauritian, a member of the millennial generation and non-binary whom uses they/them pronouns. Kieran experiments with form and colour in the context of the photographic still life and portrait to explore gender politics, dandyism, practices of drag, queerness, identity presentation, reading and passing. Working towards a non-binary philosophy of photography Kieran employs transgender studies as a methodology to reflect on a queer construction of the photographic medium and identity politics. Kieran draws from the shared properties of illusion, material transformation and magic that uniquely characterise the non-binary and photography.

Rather than defining the photograph as an image, an object or a performance, their work reads as neither and all simultaneously. Their photographs present themselves confusedly, eclectically, naively and flamboyantly; a performance of identity formation where one transforms from an image, to an object, right before your eyes.

closeupatadistance series of photographic works engages with and speculates upon the contradictory imagining & imaging of disappearance and loss as carrier of perhaps our deepest and most culturally specific values, actions and consequences. It is within contested landscapes – here, Jordan & Negev Desert – through which layers of geographic and geomorphic tableaus play out and within which narratives of migration, exile and the reverberation of aftermath are revealed.

closeupatadistance series connects issues of confounding anxious forgetting, reclamation and strangeness of unwritten invisible bodies and vistas. closeupatadistance, frequently works from an assumption of a paradox that there is no way to bridge aerial vision with individual human agency on the ground, even if what we are witnessing is accumulations of human activities, it is in many aspects an aftermath of impacts and events.

The multidisciplinary practice of Sydney-based artist Tim Silver is inextricably hinged on time, both conceptually and materially. Working across sculpture, photography and installation, Silver explores the interface between time and decay, particularly in relation to the human body.

His sculptures are often made from entropic materials, such as fairy floss and putty, which begin to decompose from the moment of their assembly. By photographically capturing these stages of decay, the artist presents us with a microcosmic image of our own inevitable trajectory towards death. There is a paradoxical beauty that emerges from within the warped and crumbled forms, precipitating a poignant awareness of the preciousness and fragility of human life.

Todd McMillan is a Sydney-based artist whose photography, film and video works operate at the crossroads of conceptual art, modernism and literature. Bringing the themes of Romanticism to bear on the humorous and often pitiful adventures of the twenty-first century, McMillan’s deeply introspective image-based works evoke the tragicomedy of life, the inevitability of failure and the place of sincerity in the face of hopelessness. In his works, acts of endurance and repetition mediate questions of meaning and, ultimately, purpose. The attempt, however awry it may go, to make sense of the world is given poetical importance. What we see when we look at the work of Todd McMillan are lives - human, fallible, and yet intrinsically striving, trying to negotiate injury, obstacle and the barrier of empty time.

My work explores the effect that contemporary technology has on human relationships: central to this practice is an exploration of real and unreal representations of the self. Within my photographic work, this often involves the use of macro photography to capture Ultra HD representations of the human surface, examining detail in the skin which is not visible without technological mediation. Further, these photographs use Artificial Intelligence and automated processes in compositing photographs together. The inferences and computer-generated gapfillers give a glimpse at the computer’s perception of the human surface, expressed through the glitches and repetitions of the stitched image.

Through photography and video, Val Wens’ practice is an exploration of the complexities of identity within a contemporary visual arts context. In his current project, Wens refers to an Indonesian ethnic minority, the Osing ethnic group of East Java and also the landscape of Banyuwangi (East Java).

This body of work references the identity struggle among the minority Osing population within a hegemonic and hetero-normative mainstream, Muslim Javanese culture, which describes the Osing as a sub Javanese group (the artist himself is from the mainstream Javanese group). Performing juggling and balancing acts in several locations in Banyuwangi, Wens creates metaphors to do with human struggle.

These struggles also echo Wens’ own personal struggles as a gay Indonesian man and religious sceptic, brought up in both Islamic and Catholic households.