Robyn Stacey: Dark Wonder

Overview

The latest exhibition at Paddington's Stills gallery features images that take you inside iconic Australian artists' studio spaces — not to mention inside the mechanism of early photography.

Robyn Stacey creates her art by turning entire rooms into camera obscura, which, for those who didn't study photography at school, is a dark box with a lens that projects the outside world onto a screen inside, except upside down and back-to-front (much like how our eyes project images onto the retina). Stacey boards up the windows of the spaces she photographs, leaving only a ray of light. Then, for a few hours in the day, an image of the outside world is projected onto the opposing wall, and Stacey photographs this at the perfect moment of light and clarity.

This exhibition features photographs of a number of artists' spaces she used this technique on, including Wendy and Brett Whiteley's library, the National Art School and the Rose Seidler House (which was designed by Harry Seidler for his parents, Rose and Max Seidler). You can also step inside rooms that Stacey has turned into camera obscura — one in the gallery and another (for two weeks only on 8-9 and 14-15 October) at the Courthouse Hotel in Darlinghurst's Taylor Square.

The exhibition opens at 3pm on Saturday, October 8 with a talk from Wendy Whiteley, or head to the gallery on Saturday, October 15 at 3pm for the artist talk.

Image: Robyn Stacey, Inside Wendy & Brett Whiteley Library, Lavender Bay, 2016.