Anna Carey: Mirage

Overview

The recent fad for tilt shift photography meets its antithesis in Mirage by Anna Carey. Where tilt-shift made the real look miniature, Carey makes the miniature look real. At first seeming to be a series of photos of abandoned Gold Coast beach buildings, the buildings are in fact each miniature models photographed in situ by Carey. Just as Eugene Agtet documented Parisian buildings scheduled for demolition, Carey's art here gets interested in the Vegas-like rapid turnover of architecture on the Gold Coast. Though her buildings aren’t models of real places, they still feel real and adding location backdrops completes the illusion.

The stilted house of Golden Palms is a green study of Queensland winds and shaggy heat. Sea Mist’s lonely, blue weatherboard building seems to sag, windows lolling open with humidity. Not unlike David Hockney’s Los Angeles paintings, which were real images polished to became portraits of a dream city, Carey has skipped ahead to land at the end of this same architectural dream, four decades later.

The show also includes the original models used in Stardust, Crystal Pacific and Pacific Moon. Getting close to these cardboard and toothpick-wooden models, you can appreciate how much work went into the design of a rotten door or faded rail. And doubly so how much more work lay in covering up what flaws remained in photographic circles of confusion as Mirage manages to transfer dream to reality, documenting an older incarnation of the Gold Coast slowly making way for a newer version of same.

Photo Star Dust by Anna Carey.