Built Photography
by Anouska Phizacklea
Publication text, Museum of Australian Photography
June 2024
Curated by artists Kiron Robinson and Izabela Pluta, Built photography brings together 16 artists who explore photography as a physical construction. Arguably one of photography's defining aspects is its flatness, its surface plane. So why are artists building out from this, constructing objects as photography?
Built photography proposes a conversation between photography's material, its surface and form and especially its objectness, against which the flatness of the photographic plane is interrogated. Through processes of 'inflation', photographs disrupt the two-dimensional surface to complicate the spatial relationship between the content of an image and its physical form.
A built photograph becomes a three-dimensional proposition that can be twisted, torn, pulled apart, pierced, stripped and exposed. It is a process of investigation: how can the traditional reading of a photograph - through its two-dimensional representative function - be extended, and what happens in the acknowledgement of the objectness of the materials involved in the creation and display of the photograph?
The exhibition features newly commissioned works, a portion of which will be acquired into the MAPh collection as well as loaned works by artists who speak to an intrinsic photographic condition of surface and flatness while simultaneously resisting it.
The exhibition's publication acts as a compendium to the works, augmenting the exhibition with artist bios, extended texts, imagery and an interview between Izabela and Kiron that in itself becomes a construction of prose.
We are incredibly grateful for the artists who have enabled us to exhibit their work: Jack Ball, Trent Crawford, Jessica Curry, Lucas Davidson, Damian Dillon, Jacqueline Felstead, Janina Green, Luke Parker, Kiah Pullens, Jacky Redgate, Talia Smith, Katrina Stamatopoulos, Andrew Tetzlaff, Marian Tubbs, Skye Wagner and Grace Wood. A very special acknowledgement to Kiron Robinson and Izabela Pluta, who have graciously contributed a unique perspective to photography as spatial practice - a brilliantly insightful investigation as curators, artists and academics.