trespasses
nazzari, costantino, dagnall
10 November - 9 December 2017
artist talks:
3pm saturday 11 November
Trespasses is a group exhibition featuring the work of three well known Perth artists: Thea Costantino, Rebecca Dagnall and Anna Nazzari.
The exhibition explores an ambivalent relationship with Australian places and colonial history through the lens of the Gothic. The Gothic is a pervasive mode for exploring anxieties about the Australian settler-colonial experience, particularly the settler's struggle between the knowledge of colonial violence and the imperative to repress its memory by displacing it defensively onto the landscape. The exhibition's title mines the resonances of the term 'trespass' to refer both to entering someone's land without permission and the perpetration of a sin or offence.
For Trespasses Thea Costantino has produced a body of drawings and photographs that explore the uncanny resurfacing and repetition of colonial power within everyday places and spaces in Australia. These works stage a drama of nostalgia, forgetting and haunting: a menacing crowd of militia gathers for a commemorative portrait, a pair of lizards floating in a specimen jar and a solitary locust seem to portend apocalyptic events, and ruined and empty spaces suggest the aftermath of violence.
Costantino is currently based in the UK, working as Head of Visual Arts in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire. She holds a PhD from Curtin University, where she worked from 2005 - 2017. Thea has received a 2015 Visual Arts and Craft Mid-Career Fellowship from the WA Department of Culture and the Arts, the 2013 Hutchins Art Prize, a 2011 Qantas Foundation Art Award and the 2012 Artsource/Gunnery Artist Exchange. Her work is held in major collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of WA, The Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, Murdoch University, John Curtin Gallery, City of Perth, and City of Joondalup.
In the photographic work of Rebecca Dagnall the notion of the trespasser can be translated as the coloniser. In all five images an alien landscape alludes to the unknown and uncanny - revealing colonial anxieties. In the image The other side of the world, a rabbit is seen peering from a seemingly floating island of rock into the void. The rabbit in this image can be read as both naive in its adolescence and as pest. What we do know about the rabbit is that it is good at adapting to extreme environments.
It may seem when looking at Dagnall's work that there are two distinct categories - images of the landscape alone and those that contain fauna. In the context of this series of work they are not separate but rather merging elements of the same story. Her images of the Australian landscape portray an ominous and haunting quality, in which colonial history leaves an indelible trace.
Rebecca Dagnall has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally. Her works can be found in several important collections, including the Art Gallery of WA. She has been a repeat finalist in some prestigious awards such as the William Bowness Photographic Award, the Josephine Ulrich and Win Shubert Photographic award and a semi finalist in the Moran Photographic Award. Rebecca received a Judges commendation award in the City of Joondalup Invitation Art Award 2012 and in 2014 won first prize in the Victoria Park Art Award.
Anna Nazzari's eerie photographic prints and animation are inspired by her childhood home, spent growing up in Kalgoorlie Boulder, which sits on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert. The waterways of the region (Burra Rocks, Lake Douglas, Coolgardie Gorge, Niagara Dam etc.) occupied her mind as mysterious feats of pioneering innovation - water where water was not supposed to be. In the searing heat of summer, as long as these places possessed water, she imagined the wildlife would thrive. A dry summer inevitably led to an increase in different species foraging for food along the highways, which were death traps.
She stated, "this body of work is both a homage to my childhood and an extension of my interest in Australian Gothic film, which repeatedly portrays the idea that the Australian landscape is unhomely and has the potential to disorient or disempower an 'out of place' populace. The artworks chart the arrival of an unknown presence in the dam at Burra Rocks and the possession of dead fauna it has selected for regeneration and emancipation."
Anna Nazzari is a multi-media artist whose art practice spans video, sculpture, photography, drawing, pyrography and writing. She has a PhD from Curtin University, where she was also awarded several Outstanding Student and Vice Chancellor's Lists and the Executive Dean's Award. In 2015 she was awarded Best Horror/Sci-Fi Short Film (Paris Short Film Festival), Best Experimental Short Film (International Horror Hotel Ohio) and Official Selection in the Cellar Door Film Festival in Ottawa Canada for Cetaphobia (co-director and producer).
This project has been supported by the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions (CHE) Associate Investigator Scheme
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