In her first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography, Justine Varga invites viewers to experience a large-scale installation that immerses them in photography's unique means of production.
A deeply thoughtful artist who uses analogue techniques, sometimes with a camera and sometimes without one (oh, what, you didn't know cameraless photography was a thing?), Varga is interested in complicating a viewers experience of both time and 'looking', inviting them to join her in interrogating the photographic process itself.
In Photogenic Drawing this process is put on display through a dense layering of test strips – incomplete pieces of a photo that the artist explains as 'not quite photographs'. The result is a rare insight into the decisions made in a photographer's studio and lab, where photographs are 'tested, transformed, rejected, reprinted, found wanting and destroyed'.
Intrigued? Head along to the ACP between September 8 and October 21 for an insight into the parts of a photographer's work that aren't usually given public exposure.
Image: Installation view (cropped), Memoire, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide, September 2016. Photo: Steph Fuller. Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery.