Current Season Current Exhibitions Current Events Video Lounge Future Exhibitions Past Exhibitions Touring Exhibitions News Catalogues Online Projects How to propose an exhibition Exhibitions for Hire 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 When iconic, ironic Australian band Mental as Anything first released If you leave me, can I come too? in 1981, the Mentals were decidedly upbeat, marrying lyrical rejection and self-loathing with a catchy tune. A couple of months ago I switched-on my car radio and heard to my surprise a live recording of the song - a guitar-strumming, shoe-gazing kind of acoustic version. After twenty-five years, the artists still own the sentiment and the song, but the mood has shifted - from irritatingly cocksure, to quietly introspective. So wherefore have the Mentals lost all their mirth? Melancholia is a Romantic psychological condition that continues to be explored in (and stirred-by) music, literature, film and photomedia. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, melancholy was considered a positive and necessary part of creative processes - separate from religious devotion - as almost a path towards enlightenment. Dissociation, a form of emotional detachment, can be viewed as an internal flip-side to melancholy, but perhaps the symptoms of both can appear similar, even interconnected. Sitting alone thinking about yourself, after all, can look identical to sitting alone blocking things out. While advances in psychiatric medicine have differentiated extreme forms of mental illness from the poetic idea of melancholy, as a society we have become adverse to periods of reflection, feelings of sadness, loneliness or apprehension. Driven by our desires, we disconnect, tune-out and find happiness increasingly through the attainment of possessions and the pursuit of short-lived joy. Melancholy meanwhile embraces imperfections and the full scale of human emotion. It is a retreat for the individual away from the noise of mass culture, quietly confronting the quick-fix solutions offered by consumerism. The artists, assembled from across Australia for If you leave me, can I come too? explore contemporary ideas and phenomena from environmental disconnection, urban loneliness, lifestyle dissatisfaction, family crises, personal failure and hope (yes) within this dysfunction. Their work, suffused with emotional agency and humour, spans photography, installation, archives and printed materials. Hanging in the entrance of the gallery is Melbourne-based photographer Ian Tippett's strikingly observed series, The Last Cigarette. His candid, street-level photographs represent the corporate world's new outcasts; cigarette smokers. Reluctant sentinels, hovering around doorways and pacing an overwhelming concrete wasteland with practiced disaffection, they are cast on the one hand as pathetic figures. The photographs, taken during the day in a hard-edged urban landscape have the appearance of being studio-lit in the bright sunlight and enveloping shadow. Smoke lingers in the air and these moments of stillness, of inwardly-drawn breath (and thought) reveal expressions and attitudes of pain and relief that seem somehow transcendental. Facing-off Tippett's series are Melbourne artist, Natasha Johns-Messenger's macro photographs Lost in Space. Pushed to almost breaking-point, her large-scale images of dioramas containing tiny figurines are arranged to suggest human qualities. As an artist whose practice is predominantly installation-based, fashioning complex reconfigurations of space and perception, in these works Johns-Messenger enlarges minute gestures and relationships. The moment that they achieve a sense of humanity to our eyes, we are denied further engagement by their inured state and obvious plasticity. Facial expression and 'tude are, however, idiosyncratically rendered by the duo of "Westie-chick" artists, Raquel Ormella and Regina Walter for their special edition of FLAPS. For the #10 issue of this zine, Knocked-Back, the artists make drawings from video stills of the young people that didn't buy their work at a recent zine fair (held at Electrofringe in Newcastle). With images of individuals addressing the artists with expressions of pinch-faced disdain, embarrassment, self-consciousness and even opportunism, Ormella and Walter exorcise their rejection demons with a public outing and conciliatory doughnut. In the gallery space Kate McMillan's photo-based installation, History's Debris (and other things you concealed from me, and I tried to forget) forms a confronting spectre. As domestic veil and perhaps a shroud, her curtain holds a black and white image of Tarawera Lake in New Zealand within its folds. In this picture the hills surrounding the lake are shown to be covered in ash following a volcanic eruption that occurred in the late 19th century. McMillan is a Perth-based artist who trawls family history as a notion she can access only through fragmented imagery. In this work there is a sense that the place is locked in a memory impossible to access or release. The curtain can never be drawn-back. In Coming Home Tasmanian-based Simon Cuthbert captures an aspirational image of landscape confined within a functional environment of expedience and haste. This photograph of an airport luggage carousel comprises part of a complex series that examines facets of a society so alienated from nature that it seeks synthetic ways to reintroduce the natural world into public and commercial domains. With environmental crises worsened by corporate greed, there is obvious irony to be found in a photograph of a boutique shoe store that juxtaposes its products against photo-wallpaper of an awesome rocky landmass, or that of burger joint decorated with forest and lake scenery. Cuthbert's visual enquiry finds subtlety in these spaces - that our decorative use of the photographic image points to hope, possibility and ways that we would like to value nature. For her photographic series, Stay Young, Lyndal Walker refuses the insistence of eternal youth promised by glossy magazines by turning her lens on young men in domestic settings. Conceived in response to an experience of working for fashion photographers, here in these works there is the unglamorous evidence of share-housing, tertiary study and the subcultural affiliations of protracted adolescence. Walker snatches moments of time from male specimens at a particular point of youthful potential, like picking flowers before their blooms are unfurled. The work is gentle, tender and life affirming, but it is also gathered to expose frailty and the inevitability of death. As each day passes, the images of these young men slip closer to becoming mere shadows of something already lost - ghosts that are always referred to in the present. Greta Anderson's project Walking and Talking comprises video and a series of photographic triptych. The work explores familial discomfort, strained relationships and personal crises within apparently 'natural' settings including a winding stream, pine forest and botanical garden - all spaces transformed by human intervention . While the narration of her still, montage-based video unfolds storylines that overwhelm the idyllic imagery, her still printed photographs overwhelm their human subjects in greenery and foliage conveying a sense of symbiosis, even in crisis. Canberra-based Elvis Richardson has amassed a substantial collection of other people's archives over the last few years. Slides of family history collected from e-bay and second-hand stores are re-configured into arrangements of orphaned moments, no longer wanted by their original owners. In this dual projection, Richardson has worked with the archive of Dorothy, an American, amateur photographer born in 1908 (and probably deceased). The aesthetic detail, thoughtful composition and love evident in the portraits of her husband, Jack and her domestic still-life and table settings, are at odds with the commercial nature of Richardson's acquisition of her slides. In the first part of their video and sound series, Meditations, BORIS + NATASCHA manipulate the structure of "guided visualisation practices" to create a chilling alternative to self-help. The work combines ideas to be found in pessimistic German philosophy, such as those of Arthur Schopenhauer in his treatise on The World as Will and Idea, with Buddhist meditations that use negative emotions as a focus for change. As the narration progresses through a spiral of self-doubt, rather than pulling-away from fear, BORIS + NATASCHA follow through to a worst-case-scenario conclusion. Maha Puja composed & performed by David Parsons From the album "Yatra" (P) 1999 Celestial Harmonies Image Credits: • Ian Tippett The last Cigarette #2 2005 •  Natasha Johns-Messenger Lost in Space 3 2004 •  Kate McMillan History's Debris (and other things you concealed and I tried to forget) 2006, courtesy of Margaret Moore fine art •  Simon Cuthbert Coming Home 2005, courtesy of Despard Gallery, Hobart •  Lyndal Walker Ben, Do you want to live forever? from Stay Young 2005 •  Greta Anderson Confidence from Walking And Talking 2005 •  Elvis Richardson Happy Cheers to You 1974 from Slide Show Land 2004-2006 •  BORIS + NATASCHA Meditations #1 2006 Exhibition generously supported by Pixel Perfect Prolab Terms and Conditions | © Copyright: Australian Centre for Photography, 2008. All Rights Reserved. Site by Suture Net | Hosting by Dreamhost