How do we respond to the damage of time? How can we place on film the eternal conflict between entropy on the one hand and the perpetual irruption of life on the other?
In the exhibition, the apparent deterioration of the Flinders street station ballroom over the past 30 years is emphasized by a rough acid bleaching technique. In addition to photographs of the architecture and details of the building, a series of adult female portraits are displayed in the foreground with details of the Ballroom (and other rooms in the same area of the building) in the background. The Ballroom’s juxtaposition with the preserved portraits attempts to portray via a simple dualism the essential idea of negentropy – of life continually emerging from within a situation of stasis and decay.
Photography’s capacity to extract a subject out of time as a piece of art is exemplified in an exhibition such as this. As Susan Sontag has written in On Photography, it is the camera’s ability to both seize and freeze a particular moment that allows it to witness the incessant dissolution of things brought upon by the relentless march of time.
However, the juxtaposition of Ballroom details and human portraits also suggests that buildings and shared spaces still live on in the memories of those of us who once circulated within them, or who have heard the stories of those who once did.
Despite having been closed to the public for 30 years, there remains a large but latent repository of memories, expectations or fantasies about the Ballroom in Melbourne. This subterranean myth about the Ballroom – of its elegance and former grandeur, of its vaunted role in another, much simpler, era – suggests the Ballroom still fulfils a subconscious wish-fantasy role in contemporary Melbourne society, a role at variance with, but not negated by, its present material decline...Read more about the prints
Find back the press articles related to the Ballroom Exhibition (Alliance Francaise de Melbourne - 31 January - 1 March 2008):
- The Age, EG, 25 January 2008
-
Herald Sun, 29 January 2008
-
The Age, A2, 2 February 2008
|
