wild thing
In recent exhibitions, Nicola Loder’s photographic and video work has evinced an interest in the humanistic concerns of its subjects: large-scale, low-angle shots of heroic children collaged against a gallery wall; videos of intimate negotiations between strangers locked together for the first time. In her most recent work, Wild Thing, Loder complicated the expectation that this would be a strangely familiar foray into another’s subjectivity.
Eight ‘Photoshopped’ collages were hung on two walls of the front room of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP). Four bucolic panoramas, each four metres by seven centimetres, spanned one wall like historical timelines. Here, Arcadian fantasies of expansive, undulating landscapes blipped with trees were observed by two freshly shorn sheep. On the adjacent wall were four square collages of innumerable tourists happy-snapping their way through the five-star sites of piazze in Florence, Siena and Venice. Both series had been digitally recomposed: the panoramas were not only seamlessly and excessively elongated, but indexical details (such as other sheep) had been deleted for dramatic effect; the collages consisted of scores of photographs of small groups of people, taken at high-angle from atop tall campanile, all jumbled together for the impression of teeming throngs of humanity locked together in the squares.
A number of easy interpretations could be made about Wild Thing, but they just seemed, well, too easy. Apparently conceived during the hey-day of Dolly the Sheep, the cloning threat Number One, Wild Thing obviously questioned the reasoning behind cloning (using ‘Photoshop’ clone techniques) as the over-abundant human population depicted tried to clone their memories through tourist photography. Alternatively, there was the overt self-reflexivity of Loder’s ‘photography of photography’, the tiny tourists oblivious