HABITS
AND HABITATS
Introduction
Performance Space is delighted to present this new photomedia installation
by NSW-based artist duo Patrick Ronald and Shannon McDonell.
Since
moving to the CarriageWorks in 2007, we have commissioned
works for the foyer area that have resonated with
the site and its histories, or in this case, have
juxtaposed a different kind of place and scale
against its industrial architectures.
As
a multidisciplinary organisation with a national
focus, we are pleased to be working with contemporary
artists who choose to work outside of the normative
centres for cultural activity, bringing different
perspectives into our program.
Ronald & McDonell’s Habits
and Habitat offers visitors the opportunity to become part of a constructed scene and to
take a voyeuristic look into another person’s
home.
Through
painstaking detail, the project investigates cultural
transfer, the connection (and disconnections) between
country and city, and the ways that the ‘bush’
continues to inform Australian culture and identity.
Daniel
Brine, Director, Performance Space
Habits
and Habitat
Jean
Baudrillard began Simulacra and Simulation by referring to Jorge Luis Borges’ tiny paragraph-length fable about an unnamed
empire that sought to represent its territory with
a 1:1 scaled map as a “second-order simulacra”.1
No longer even useful as an inversion, Baudrillard
used the fable as a spring-board to leap into notions
of the Hyperreal: of simulation without territory
and origin, without doubling and mirroring.2 But
is Borges’ fable entirely useless if it is applied
to place and temporality? The representation of
empires on the cusp of change and disappearance?
While the exact map could never stand for place
itself, it could certainly show us a semblance
of what once was. The drive to represent, however,
would be borne of different motivations perhaps,
more akin to certain obsessions in photography:
to stop a place/ location in time, to “rescue time from its proper corruption”.3
I
became drawn to the almost forensic photographic
practice of Patrick Ronald and Shannon McDonell
not only from an uncomplicated enjoyment of their
very complicated representational methodology and
its results, but by the fact of their emotional
connection to places: specifically to Australian
country towns, which form a large part of their
shared experience as young artists who have chosen
to work outside of city-centres and hubs of contemporary
practice. Their first attempts at a kind of measured
exactitude in photography, called MICROCOSM in 2005 were further developed as part of a series of responses within a longer-term
project called Disappearing Tasmania: An Image of the West which commenced in 2006. This year-long project took an interactive approach
to documenting towns that had been transformed
by shifting agricultural practices and economies,
through both photographs of abandoned buildings
and abodes, photographic portraits and in-depth
interviews with each location’s remaining inhabitants.
The
artists’ photographic representations of buildings
in country towns shared something of the objective
and aesthetically unfettered practice of German
photographic duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began
working together in the late 1950s on a typological
project documenting disappearing German industrial
architectures and engineered structures. Their
famous series of black and white images of water
towers stood out among examples of formal modernist
photography, for the palpable sense of distance
they achieved and attention to difference within
a seemingly mundane range of subjects. Where the
Becher’s approach relied on calculated distance,
Ronald and McDonell’s process relied on a calculated
proximity, with each photograph of buildings from
the artist’s various series being constructed from hundreds of closerange images digitally stitched back together.
The effect of this process was a kind of uncanny
flattening, which represented the building as floating
free of its surroundings, without the sense of
perspective and depth that one can usually distinguish
in photographic images taken from a single vantage
point. Shown together, and often to scale, the
range of buildings, from small houses, to local
shops, to post offices to large warehouses, revealed
the scale and scope of economic change and its
impact on basic services and the ability of a town
to function as a community.
Habits
and Habitat is a micro-to-exact photographic extension of the artists’ deepening concerns
with change in communities and places that have
previously been defined by their relative stability.
The project re-presents selected elevations of
rooms in a working farmhouse in NSW, in two-dimensional
1:1 scale, like a small corner of the map of
Borges’ unnamed empire. As a house that has remained
largely unchanged for many years (save the necessary
upgrades in entertainment and other technologies),
it stands in opposition to the nature and appearance
of city-based properties, as markets revolve
increasingly around temporary occupation, cosmetic
and structural renovation, and speculation. Viewing
the kitchen image, with its original fittings
and the texta-drawn graph accumulating the standing heights of loved-ones and visitors, it seems like we are being shown a projection
from the past; a fragment from a time when people
remained in one place, and followed a path firmly
established by the generation that preceded them.
In
this domestically reflective series, juxtaposed
within the CarriageWorks’ post-industrial ambience,
we are able to peer across (and almost into) a
flattened scene, wherein walls, objects and the
dust that occasionally settles on them, are given
equal visual weight. Resisting the qualities that
one could associate with ‘good’ photography, Ronald
has taken thousands of evenly-spaced, evenly lit
and equidistant photographs of each room, leaving
the digital piecing-back together of the elevations
to McDonell (amusingly reflected by the jigsaw
image of the Mona Lisa shown hanging on the wall of the house’s living room). Through this apportioned
methodology, the artists seek to undermine both
visual hierarchies and the illusory qualities of
photomedia. We see the image as a whole, from a
distance, but its flatness and non-compliance with
linear perspective forces us to look closer, to
take in the details and to read the images with
the same proximity and level of intimacy as they
were originally taken. Though pseudo-scientific
in nature, borrowing from archaeological photography
I view Habits and Habitat as an attempt to take a measure and a resonance of domestic spaces that have
held the lifetimes of their occupants, but are
yet fragile and will, in time, disappear.
Ronald
and McDonell’s work is processual in ways that
are both epic in terms of scale and quantity of
visual data, and also minute and painstaking in
detail. From a small country town in NSW, the artists
work in a micro-realist modality that is rooted
to an emotional connection to the places from which
they collect their images. Rather than tourists
or day-trippers in their commitment to exactitude
in representation, the duo is rather firmly entrenched
in rural Australian habits and habitats.
Bec
Dean, Associate Director, Performance Space
1
This single paragraph, On Exactitude in Science was written by Borges in 1946 and attributed falsely by the author to Suarez
Miranda, 1658. Various sources.
2 Baudrillard, Jean, trans. By Sheila Faria Glaser, Simulacra
and Simulation, The University of Michigan Press, 2003, pp. 1
3 Bazin, André, trans. By Hugh Gray “The Ontology of the Photographic
Image,” Film
Quarterly, 13, 4, 1960, pp. 8
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