Built photography at MAPh

Curated by artists Kiron Robinson and Izabela Pluta, with support from Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) Director Anouska Phizacklea, Built Photography brings together 16 artists who explore photography as a physical construction.

Overview

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’s 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 as well as loaned works by artists who speak to an intrinsic photographic condition of surface and flatness while simultaneously resisting it.

Featured artists are 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.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that 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.