tracey benson, di ball, troy-anthony baylis, pat hoffie, john armstrong, the campfire group
Two dimensional image production has developed into something which often resembles screen production more than classic studio-based practice, with artists' studios evolving as digital labs filled with equipment such as computers, scanners, digital cameras, video machines and printers. Hybrid creative practices and imagery have emerged from artistic experimentation with digital technologies, and these technologies have provided the means for artists to produce new and complex visual languages through the combination of diverse visual arts practices including photography, collage, printmaking, drawing, painting and video, within a virtual realm. it was while I was considering the radical impact of digital technologies on two-dimensional image production that I encountered an exhibition that showcased the work of five Brisbane-based artists and one collective that produce computer generated and manipulated two dimensional artworks.
Topographies, curated by Linda Carroli presented work by Tracey Benson, Di Ball, Troy-Anthony Baylis, Pat Hoffie, John Armstrong and the Campfire Group. Carroli insightfully located a commonality between these artists which contributed to the curatorial basis of the exhibition that they all engage in various ways with representing landscapes and show an interest in mapping geographic or cultural spaces, exploring relationships between place, symbolism and identity. Although she insists in her catalogue essay that this was a 'pleasant surprise', rather than the conscious premise behind the exhibition, it was the connecting thread running through the artists' work that gave the exhibition a continuity and resonance.
It can be argued that views of geography and representations of the landscape are often informed by culturally specific knowledges and expectations of what is considered a 'livable' or ideal environment. Pat Hoffie's The Subject of Landscape is Irretrievably Conceptual explores some relationships between cultural subjectivity, representations