The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Keeping her head above water.
Vivienne Binns' Surface Snaps mark a relatively new foray into photography. These are not finished art photographs, nor are they holiday snaps of anywhere recognisable; they are how-ever treasured images of one place, Brisbane Waters, which holds particular meaning for the artist. Yet the location is opaque, the images themselves are about a kind of visual ambiguity, an indeterminacy of seeing and of representing. The 'snaps', enlarged from small prints, are monochromatic and blurred; their surfaces shift and change, altered by the uncertainty of what is being seen. The photographs explore the surfaces of water. Shadows and reflections of boats, trees, seagrass and shallows chase over them, creating perversely beautiful effects: perverse because of the images' refusal to enter the swim of art photography. The 'natural' effects of wind and light on surfaces provide another means for Binns to explore the business of patterning, something which has been an enduring aspect of her practice. In using the camera consciously as an amateur to take snapshots which are blown up to the size of 'professional' prints, she is also addressing ideas which have consistently animated her work over nearly thirty years. Binns delights in teasing out notions of art and decoration , in redrawing the lines between amateur and professional, and in focussing her highly refined skills on apparently naïve or 'natural' subjects.
Vivienne Binns' interest in patterning is obvious in the other works in this exhibition. The small works on paper are derived from tapa designs, painted in acrylics onto patterned Japanese rice paper and pages from old Guardian Weekly newspapers-the airmail kind. As with the larger paintings on canvas, Binns' use of the tapa