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Donna Bailey (Australia), Roger Ballen (South
Africa), Marco Bok (Australia), Yvonne Doherty
& Justin Spiers (Australia), Patricia Driscoll
& Tamsyn Reynolds (South Africa), Chris
Fortescue (Australia) & Katharina Struber
(Austria), Hayden Fowler (Australia), Rachel Fuller
(Australia), Su Goldfish (Australia), Petrina Hicks
(Australia), Nicole Jean Hill (USA), Carol Jerrems
(Australia), Aleksandras Macijauskas (Lithuania),
Michael Northrup (USA), Carolee Schneemann (USA),
Arthur Tress (USA), Michael Vale (Australia),
Beverley Veasey (Australia), Hanneke van Velzen
(Netherlands) and William Wegman (USA).
Treasured and treacherous: Our non-human companions
take over the newly renovated Australian Centre for
Photography this summer.
From feline voyeurism and canine collaboration to
animal aesthetics and inter-species treachery,
Pet Project as its title suggests, looks at
the personal and particular bonds we forge with
animals. An exhibition of international and
Australian photomedia art, Pet Project
explores visual representation of companion
animals, ideas of "significant otherness" and
humankind's equivocal connection to the
non-human.
For many people in westernised societies, pets and
domesticated creatures act as our last remaining
tie to the animal kingdom - largely held at bay by
deforestation, agriculture and the rapidly
expanding metropolis. In recent years however, the
use and portrayal of animals by contemporary
artists has gained a degree of prominence. Now it
would appear that questioning our relationship to
other living beings has found some intellectual
currency, rather than being sidelined as merely
sentimental, whimsical or eccentric - qualities
generally deemed to belong to so-called low art and
culture.
The works included in this exhibition variously
challenge and consider notions of property and
ownership, inter-species power dynamics, kinship,
collaboration and the ways in which animals are
used as evocative symbols and tropes in art -
signifying altogether human themes, aspirations,
hopes and fears.
Through photographic studio portraits, staged
tableaux, candid documentary photographs,
photo-based installation and video, the artists
selected for Pet Project reveal complexity
and depth in animal companionship. Here they
explore provocative ideas, from species
disconnection and loneliness, to the dissolution of
the animal/human divide.
BEC DEAN
Donna
Bailey (AUS)
Ambition
2005, Honour 2005, Promise (Blanche and Serene)
2005,
Compassion 2005 All type C prints 50 x
65cm
This series of images of children and their pets
stems from the artist's curiosity about small
people and the (usually) easy, yet fascinating
relationships that they have with their special
animals. The children pictured in this series all
live in rural settings near Bendigo, in central
Victoria. Chinese history and culture has a strong
presence in Bendigo and each image has been named
after the individual characteristics of the rabbit,
rat, rooster and dog as they are represented within
Chinese astrology.
Donna Bailey lives near Kangaroo Flat in central
Victoria and is well known for her images of her
children and their friends. She has participated in
numerous exhibitions throughout Australia since the
late 1990s, including at the ACP, NGV, Art Gallery
of NSW, CCP, Monash University Museum of Art,
Monash Gallery of Art and over 20 regional and
other galleries.
Roger
Ballen (South Africa)
Puppy
between feet 1999, Portrait of a sleeping
girl 2000 both resin prints 63.5 x 64.5cm,
Early Morning 2001, Guardian 2001,
Fraught 2003 all digital prints 65 x
65cm
Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery,
Sydney
Ballen's staged photographs of South African
workers, miners and farmers in their homes with
family members, animals and pets are both sensitive
and quietly shocking. In recent work, his
photographic compositions have taken-on sculptural
and painterly qualities that are far removed from
his documentary photography origins.
Roger Ballen was born in New York City in 1950 and
has lived in Johannesburg South Africa for almost
30 years. Beginning by documenting the small dorps
or villages of rural South Africa, Ballen's
photography moved on in the late 1980's and early
1990's to their inhabitants. By the mid 1990's his
subjects began to act where previously his pictures
however troubling fell firmly into the category of
documentary photography.
Marco
Bok (AUS)
Running
Dog 2006 seven untitled digital type C prints
mounted on aluminium
Marco Bok's photographic practice revolves around
the streets and parklands of the city of Sydney
where he finds moments of delight and pathos in
everyday situations. In this exhibition, an
installation of seven works has been taken from his
extensive series of 35mm photographs that document
his dogs at play in Centennial Park. Capturing
frozen moments of gleeful interaction and speed,
these photographs vary in their level of
abstraction to reveal canine motion in ways we
cannot perceive in real time.
Marco Bok is a photographer and lecturer in
photography based in Sydney. He has a Bachelor of
Arts (majoring in sociology) from Australian
National University, Canberra and a Bachelor of
Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney
University. He has most recently held a solo
exhibition at Customs House in Circular Quay.
Yvonne
Doherty and Justin Spiers (AUS)
Pet
Photo Booth 2006 live photobooth
Gypsy & Preshus 2006, Jenny &
William 2006, Stephan & Captain
Reese 2006, John & Alice 2006,
Andrea,Tristan, Valentino & Tatiana 2006
all digital type C prints 50 x 60cm each
The Pet Photo Booth concept was realised in
2005 by Yvonne and Ali Doherty as part of Perth's
Artrage Festival. In its new, portable incarnation,
Doherty and photographer Justin Spiers have taken
the cheesy shopping-mall photo booth to a new
dimension by inviting owners to pose with their
primped and preened pets. The works in this
exhibition have been taken during recent outings of
the booth in rural Western Australia. The Pet
Photo Booth backdrops are installed at ACP in
order to capture some of Sydney's pet owners and
their furry charges.
Justin Spiers is a photographer, curator and
director of the Perth Centre for Photography
Gallery. Yvonne Doherty is a photographer and the
presenter of a local radio arts program.
"Justin is a very insightful photographer and takes
most of the photos," says Doherty. "He has this
uncanny ability to capture images that reveal
something deeply personal about his subjects and
their relationship with their pets.
"So far the reaction has been amazing, and this
reflects the love and, dare I suggest, the
obsession that people have for their animals."
Yvonne Doherty interviewed by Rosalie Higson
Patricia
Driscoll & Tamsyn Reynolds (South Africa)
six
photographs and text from the Judas Goat series
Judas Goat 2000, Judas Goat and Kid
2000, Moving sheep 2000, Pigs behind
bars 2000, Cows 2000, Factory
2000
all digital type C prints 50 x 62cm
With writer Tamsyn Reynolds, Patricia Driscoll
collaborated in 2000 on a photo story that combined
their common interest in the plight and processing
of herd animals for food. During their research
they came across the curious phenomenon of the
Judas goat - a traitorously-titled "pet" kept by
abattoir workers to lead other animals to the
slaughter.
"At the Maitland abattoir in Cape Town, the Judas
Goats meet the sheep as they are offloaded from the
trucks, and lead them into the holding pens, the
sheeps' last stop before being slaughtered. The
goats are born and raised at the abattoir. Unlike
the sheep, they are completely at ease with its
sights, smells and sounds, and their calmness and
authority appear to soothe the sheep into
submission."
"The goats seem to know exactly what to do without
being told. Like a welcome committee they wait for
the sheep to begin disembarking. Then they lead
them, past the pens of waiting pigs and cows, to
their own holding pens. The Judas goats enter the
pen and wait until all the sheep are in before
slipping out prior to the gate being closed."
Tamsyn Reynolds
Patricia Driscoll is a South African freelance
photographer and photojournalist based in
Johannesburg. Tamsyn Reynolds is a writer based in
Johannesburg.
Chris
Fortescue (AUS) & Katharina Struber
(Austria)
Guinnes,
Zobel, Elfi , Lemmy, Gras, Billy, Vaneyk, Hannerl
from the series Hundezone 2002
digital type C prints 90 x 90cm
Chris Fortescue is a Canberra-based conceptual
artist who working with local Austrian artist
Katharina Struber, staged HUNDEZONE in
Vienna in 2002. HUNDEZONE or DOGSPACE
was a site-specific work developed in response
to the prevalence of dog ownership in Vienna. The
artists took-over a nondescript shopfront and
converted it into a photographic studio, then
waited for passers-by-with-dogs to discover the
space, engaging them in conversations. The dog
portraits that were eventually taken were posted
online. For this exhibition, the artists have made
enlarged prints of these low-res, pixellated
portraits - retaining their lo-fi digital
origins.
Hayden
Fowler (AUS)
Goat
Odyssey 2006 looped digital video on DVD 15 min
10 sec, Nursling I - V 2006 digital type C
prints 65.5 x 99.5cm photo credit: Michael Randall,
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis,
Sydney
Using the domestic animal as metaphor, Hayden
Fowler seeks to question the place of humanity
within nature and thereby notions of power and
freedom. In his Fellini-esque photographic series
Nursling, a young, semi-naked man occupies
and shares a synthetic environment with two goats
and a repetitively whirring fan. This
claustrophobic, airless space becomes the stage for
an ambiguous relationship reversal - recalling the
tale of Romulus and Remus, or Kipling's Mowgli -
where the young man depicted appears to be reliant
on this other, domesticated species for care,
nutrient and support.
Sydney-based Hayden Fowler is a photomedia, video
and installation artist who trains and works-with
animals for his various multimedia projects. He is
currently undertaking a Masters in Fine Arts by
research at the College of Fine Arts, University of
New South Wales. He also has a Bachelor of Science
degree, majoring in biology from University of
Waikato, New Zealand.
Rachel
Fuller (AUS)
Losing
you is not about me 2005
looped 2 channel digital video on DVD 7 min,
videographer Tim Douglas
Rachel Fuller's meditative dual-channel video work
considers the loss of companionship from the
perspective of an observer who can only
contemplate, but never fully grasp the effect of
that loss upon another being. In this work, Fuller
has documented two scenes of her farm dogs; one
prior to, and the other following the death of one
of the animals. Vitality and affinity on one screen
is juxtaposed against patient solitude on the
other.
Rachel Fuller is a recent graduate of Sydney
College of the Arts where she majored in
photomedia. She is continuing her studies at the
Universität der Kunste in Berlin in 2007.
Su
Goldfish (AUS)
Lost
Pet Portraits #1 2006, Lost Pet Portraits #2
2006 both duratransparencies 80 x 100cm
Su Goldfish's Lost Pet Portraits are vivid
and affectionate images of well-loved,
semi-precious statues of cats and dogs. As kitsch,
chipped, china objects they have been liberated by
the artist from the "lost pet shelters" of
second-hand and op-shops and re-cast into small,
formal photographic narratives.
"My father used to give me china animals when I was
a child. They had their own tiny set of shelves
that hung on my bedroom wall. I wasn't really meant
to play with them but of course I did and, of
course, necks would snap, ears would chip and legs
would break... I feel great affection for them,
often busted up and chipped with their wonky eyes
and damaged ears and I wonder who painted such
lonesomeness into their faces. To me they radiate
patience and melancholy, wistfulness and possible
mischief." Su Goldfish
Su Goldfish is an artist, filmmaker, board
member of Queer Screen and Manager of the
Production Unit at the iO Myers Studio, University
of New South Wales.
Nicole
Jean Hill (USA)
Mr.
Mouse 2005, Chuck 2006, Shaniqua
2006, Lucy 2006, Cockroaches 2006,
Lou 2005
all type C Prints 49 x 59cm
Nicole Jean Hill takes photographs of caged and
uncaged domestic pets. In various homes and living
spaces he explores the often decorative and
aesthetic nature of animal domestication and the
relationship of ordinary people to the non-human.
Hill is particularly interested in the idea of
"species loneliness" as identified by philosopher
Robert Harrison in his book Toward a Philosophy
of Nature, and the attraction of humans to
physical and emotional contact with animals at the
same time as departing from the natural world.
Nicole Jean Hill is a photographer based in
California where she is Assistant Professor of
Photography at Humboldt State University. Hill has
exhibited across the USA and Canada and has
recently held a solo exhibition at Gallery
Sottoportego in Venice, Italy.
Petrina
Hicks (AUS)
Shenae
& Jade 2005 digital type C print on
aluminium 117 x 102cm, Jackson & Tiger
2005 digital type C print on aluminium 117 x 102cm
Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery,
Sydney
Petrina Hicks is a photographer who deals with
ideas of perfection and imperfection, stereotypes
and reality. Her works featuring children with
animals convey a tension between trust, play and
the threat of violence. In Shenae &
Jade, a young girl engages in an activity with
a budgie that could be viewed from one perspective
as a well-rehearsed parlour trick, but from
another, a breach of trust. In Jackson &
Tiger, the cattle dog bares his teeth through
the interference of the boy that holds him, making
it unclear as to who of the two species is
potentially the most dangerous.
Petrina Hicks is based in Sydney. In 2004 she was
awarded the Sydney Life, Art & About,
City of Sydney photography prize, and in 2003 the
Fisher's Ghost Art Award, Prize for Contemporary
Art Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery, NSW
and the Josephine Ulrick Photography Award for
Portraiture, Tweed River Art Gallery, NSW. Her work
is held in collections at Albury City Gallery,
Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery, Tweed
River Art Gallery, Gold Coast City Art Gallery and
ACMP collections.
Carol
Jerrems (AUS)
Trentham
Blues 1972 six gelatin silver prints 25.4 x
17.8cm each
Courtesy of the artist 's estate and the National
Gallery of Australia
Legendary Australian photographer Carol Jerrems
produced this six-image series Trentham
Blues at her own residence in Trentham Street,
Melbourne. Taken across a single day from one,
fixed vantage point, the works capture her
greyhound in various uneasy emotional states
brought about by waiting for human interaction and
attention. The photographs traverse emotional
territory from loneliness and despondency to
hopeful expectation.
The
loan of these works to the Australian Centre for
Photography is part of the National Gallery of
Australia's partnership program. This program aims
to provide greater public access to the Gallery's
collection, and marks the continuation of an
alliance with an important New South Wales
partner.
Aleksandras
Macijauskas (Lithuania)
eleven
untitled gelatin silver prints from the series
In the Veterinary Clinic 1972-1992
In the Veterinary Clinics is a series of
photographs made in the late 1970's in a rural part
of Lithuania. There Macijauskas observed a team of
vets at a veterinary training school working to
heal animals as diverse as cats, dogs, horses,
sheep, goats, fowl and injured wetland birds. The
images are uncanny, humorous, disturbing and
occasionally horrifying. The surgery Macijauskas
captures is hands-on, physical and bloody, far
removed from the sanitised and clinical waiting
rooms we are used to occupying in Australia.
Aleksandras Macijauskas was born in Kaunas,
Lithuania on 16 May 1938. He has exhibited widely
all over Europe and is a member and executive of
the Lithuanian Union of Art Photographers.
Carolee
Schneemann (USA)
Fuses
1964-66 16mm silent film converted to DVD 18
min
Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts
Intermix, New York
Schneemann's Fuses is a silent, colour work
originally made on 16mm film. The film comprises
collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking
between the artist and her then partner, composer
James Tenney. Intercut between these filmic
passages are images of her cat, Kitch who quietly
observes - from the bed and windowsill - their
human activity. In Fuses, as its title
suggests, Kitch becomes interwoven within an
exuberant document of pleasure and life shared
between different living beings.
Carolee Schneemann is a senior multidisciplinary
artist working across painting, photography,
performance art and installation. Her work is
characterised by research into archaic visual
traditions, taboos and the female body in
capitalist culture. She has had major solo
exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art;
Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris; and most recently in a retrospective at the
New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York entitled
"Up To and Including Her Limits". Schneemann has
published widely and her books include Cezanne,
She Was A Great Painter (1976), Early and
Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy:
Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979,
1997).
Arthur
Tress (USA)
Hand
and Paw, Los Angeles (Aids Patient Napping with Pet
Dog) 1999 Naked Man & Recently Deceased
Cat, Chicago 1999, Young Woman with her Pet
Great Dane, Santa Fe 1979 all gelatin silver
prints
In these staged photographs Tress has captured
three moments of intimacy between people and their
pets. As a maker of tableau images, Tress infuses
his work with surreal qualities while remaining
true to the social issues he encounters and lives
with. Loss, grief and care are explored through
poignant and playful compositions. Love is
represented as a complicated and sometimes painful
emotion.
Arthur Tress was born in New York and currently
resides in California. He has exhibited extensively
both within the United States and internationally.
His exhibition Talisman travelled to the
Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, Frankfurter
Kunstverein, Germany and Musee de la Photographie
in Belgium. His far eastern retrospective
Fantastic Voyage has travelled to India,
Korea, Thailand, New Zealand and Taiwan.
Michael
Vale (AUS)
The
Long Walk 2005 digital video on DVD 5 min 12
sec
The subject of Vale's new work The Long Walk
is the smoking dog inspired by the popular
illustrations of J. J. Grandville and Cassius
Marcellus Coolidge. The dog acts as a
representation of low art that is contemporaneous
with the most dynamic decades of Modernism. With
qualities that cast him as a walking repudiation of
High Modernist principles, he is also a symbol of
the disappearing relationship between humans and
animals. In The Long Walk, the dapper,
pipe-smoking dog wends his way through Venice,
Charleville and Paris searching for the Symbolist
poet, Arthur Rimbaud.
Michael Vale is a Melbourne artist and teacher
where he lectures in the painting departments at
Monash University, RMIT, RMIT Hong Kong, and
LaTrobe St. College. He was the founding director
of Linden Gallery, St.Kilda and also renovated the
Luna Park Ghost Train in 2000. His work is held in
public and private collections and he has painted
murals in Greece and Singapore. He is now
collaborating on short films with his wife, Donna
McRae. Their first film, Le Chien Qui Fume
has recently been screened in Italy and around
Australia.
Beverley
Veasey (AUS)
Nelson
2006 digital type C print 140 x 207cm
In Veasey's recent photographic series, Natural
History 1, she depicts different animal species
within artificial environments.
"This work depicts a time in the future when a
number of different animal species have been lost
or put under threat in the wild." Beverley
Veasey
Leached of all colour and context, the
ethereal-looking white and grey animals float like
lonely specimens against a clinical background. For
Pet Project Veasey has immortalised her own
lost Labrador, Nelson in the same style. His
statuesque head oversees activity in the gallery
below.
Beverley Veasey is a Sydney-based photographer
whose work has been exhibited extensively across
Australia. She currently lectures in photography at
the National Art School.
Hanneke
van Velzen (Netherlands)
Ruby
1998, Black 1998, Golden 1998,
Betsy 1998, Mavis1998 from the series
5 dogs all pigment prints 47 x 30.5cm
Velzen takes macro photographs, landscape
photographs, typographical studies and portraits
investigating patterns and repetition in nature.
Through her representation of ordinary and
naturally occurring things she finds archetypal and
sometimes otherworldy themes interconnecting the
images. Her photographs of dogs show five different
breeds of canine lying on their backs. The dogs all
stare self-consciously and trustfully at the
camera, in their most prone and defenceless
position.
"Dogs have no inhibitions about showing their
vulnerability and affection to those who love and
care for them". Hanneke van Velzen
Hanneke van Velzen was born in The Hague, The
Netherlands. She lives and works in New York, USA
and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. With a degree in
photography from Rochester University, New York,
she has been exhibiting widely across the United
States and the Netherlands since the late
1980's.
William
Wegman (USA)
Cubic
Chip 2001 56 x 43cm, Stepping 2003
four-panel 76 x 61cm each, Candy Up 2006 61
x 76cm, Stick Bug 2006 43 x 56cm all pigment
prints Courtesy of the artist and Senior &
Shopmaker Gallery, New York
"William Wegman has gained international
recognition for his work in photography, painting,
drawing and video. A postmodern, conceptual
humorist, he has been termed a "master of whimsy,
whose [works] have a charm and absurdist
intelligence sometimes worthy of Beckett," by
The New Yorker. Although Wegman is best well
known for his witty portraits of his Weimeraner
dogs, he is a highly original figure in the history
of video art. His comedic, performance-based tapes
of the 1970s are among the most enduring of video
classics." Electronic Arts Intermix
In these formally constructed images, Wegman's
Weimeraners are arranged and posed in relation to
space, objects and one another, creating playful
compositions of fur-on-white. While recently made,
these photographs are reminiscent of Wegman's early
work with his first dog, Man Ray where the stoic,
patient subject was placed in spatial relationships
to ambiguous symbols and objects as if trying to
learn from them and make sense of the world.
Through the collaborative nature of his
Weimeraners, Wegman's body of work on a fundamental
level, questions the nature of authority and the
structures of power.
Wegman has exhibited and published widely. His most
recent retrospective exhibition
Funney/Strange is currently travelling
around major institutions in the US.
Image Credits:
• © Yvonne Doherty and Justin
Spiers Andrea, Tristan, Valentino and
Tatiana 2006
• © Donna Bailey Promise (Blanche
and Serene) 2005
• © Roger Ballen Puppy Between
Feet 1999 Courtesy of the artist and Stills
Gallery, Sydney
• © Marco Bok Whippet in
Flight 2005
• © Yvonne Doherty and Justin Spiers
Pet Photo Booth 2006
• © Tamsyn Reynolds Judas
Goat 2000
• © Chris Fortescue and Katharina
Struber Elfi 2002
• © Hayden Fowler Nursling II
2006 Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Barry
Keldoulis, Sydney, photo credit Michael Randall
• © Rachel Fuller Losing you is
not about me 2005
• © Su Goldfish Lost Pet
Portraits #1 2006
• © Nicole Jean Hill Lou
2005
• © Petrina Hicks Shenae &
Jade 2005)
• © Aleksandras Macijauskas
untitled 1972-1992
• © Michael Northrup untitled
2000
• © Michael Vale The Long
Walk 2005
• © Beverley Veasey Nelson
2006
• © Hanneke van Velzen Mavis
1998
• © William Wegman Cubic Chip
2001 Courtesy of the artist and Senior &
Shopmaker Gallery, New York
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