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Between the painterly resolution of problems posed by photography and the photographic resolution of problems posed by painting, a host of artistic practices have emerged which, through digital technology, at present favour the dominance of photography. Merilyn Fairskye’s practice is one that has been formed in the ensuing tussle, exploring a range of genres, media and techniques.
Over the past decade, light has become thematised in Fairskye’s work, with images formed as reflections from mirror surfaces, or as shadow images cast by transparent supports. The latter preceded her adoption of photographic printing processes developed for advertising, Duratrans and Duraclear, as well as work with digital video projection.
The current conjunction of these media have resulted in two apparently unrelated projects, shown in her recent exhibition, Connected, shown at Stills Gallery, Sydney. Both allegorise the contemporary world of digital communications. As usual, the resonant or arbitrary relation between multiple narratives characterises the method and motivation of Fairskye’s work, achieving particular resonance in Duraclear.
I will therefore confine my comments to the stills at Stills. It was striking how the installation of transparencies, formatted in a row of eleven life-size vertical ‘portraits’, transformed the gallery into an ambient space, staging a contiguous relationship between life-size images of city pedestrians and viewers (a device retained from mural painting).
Gallery lights activated a doubling of the image (on acetate and the wall behind), while silhouetting the viewer within its subdued radiance. Its warmth became strangely suffused in the cool blue tonality of Ektachrome dusk. Above all, the evocation of a crepuscular mood predominated, registering dusk at the moment when daylight fails and twilight is replaced by the artifice of neon. With the aid of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline