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Mark Elliot-Ranken's exhibition, produced as core to a Visual Arts/Craft Board Project Grant, was titled Voyages of Exploration in reference to the artist's experiences in Papua New Guinea and throughout Australia.
The work extends a personal quest for identity in landscape to the visual presentation of a perceptual dichotomy of incommensurable cultural paradigms. This has grown out of Elliot-Ranken's use of the environment and of location to contextualise personal identity. By distinguishing 'the self' from 'the environment/other' dichotomous formulae are adopted, which in turn characterise chosen terms and conditions of artistic exploration. The duality perceived at this primary level is transposed to the investigation of social and cultural origins.
Throughout the series, Alien Shore, figures appropriated from Edouard Manet's Dejeuner sur I'Herbe (1863) are super-imposed as 'logo's' over gesturally painted environments-the embodiment of transplanted 'civilisation'. For this Elliot-Ranken cut/condensed images from Manet's painting down to a logo of the nude model-the woman exposed in the foreground, gazing back at the viewer-and her complement, the artist's brother who is dressed and shielded from the foreground. it is notable that of the two female figures Manet included, Ranken cut and pasted only the one which has been interpreted as physical love and sensual experience, and excluded the woman signifying spiritual experience. Farr, Bradford and Braham, among others, have interpreted Manet's "intrusively male figures" as choosing between these [women] experiences. Given this and the fact that Manet himself appropriated elements of the painting from Giorgione and possibly Titian1, it is evident that a reading of the show should extend beyond an exploration of contemporary cultural paradigms.
Ranken's work stands out as a gesture to history, re-stating the ethical/ethnic displacements that a national program