swamp dynamics
At the edge of a city on the edge of a continent.
Something old, fossil-like, cat-like, brimming with feathers from a pink feather duster glares at you crouching, motionless yet animated like a mask, as you enter the gallery at 24HR ART. I've come to view Swamp Dynamics, an exhibition by Bronwyn Wright who has been working extensively in an area known locally as the 'Swamp', which is near her home in Darwin.
The exhibition consists of A3 colour photocopies of photographs taken by Wright of the numerous abandoned cars she has worked on or been associated with over the years. The images are clipped to a rail running the length and breadth of the gallery. In the centre of the gallery is the Apollo car which is also called Feathered car, and which the artist has worked on since 1999. In one corner of the gallery is video footage of cars at the swamp, the swamp itself, and Toby and Chips, Wright's Dalmatians. What strikes most people first about the exhibition is the intense colour of the images that line the walls: walls that have become a perimeter encircling the Apollo car and colour that reverberates off its surface and through its pink feathered tendrils, filling the space in between. The photocopies are not so much documentary evidence as recordings of a process spanning many years-the distinction being that while they are carefully composed they do not attempt to communicate developmental stages in the process but rather reflect periods of time and circumstance. They are memories, like images from a family album and, to the stranger, there is no clear sequence of events. Rather than forming a narrative they