PURE INVENTION

"Pure Invention" is not a survey exhibition of contemporary Australian photography. It is not concerned with the variety of strategies presently being employed by artists throughout Australia. The artists involved are women, three are from Sydney and Fiona Hall is based in Adelaide (originally Sydney).

Aside from their age and gender, Fiona Hall, Jacky Redgate, Robyn Stacey and Anne Zahalka share an approach which can best be described as working against naturalism, photography's priviledged hold on the 'real'
and the tenet of the photodocumentary and straight photographic practices which have long seemed dominant. They are directors, auteurs, whose medium is photography rather than film, theatre, video or T.V.Anne Zahalka's series, "The Landscape Re-presented" was collaged in the studio from reproductions of famous Australian
paintings and more contemporary photographs. Her sources are familiar images to all Australians. They are found in school books, magazines and advertisements. Zahalka's collages subvert
the way these 'classic' paintings have come to represent the 'real' Australia.

Like Zahalka, Robyn Stacey uses people in her images, friends who act out roles. She incorporates handcolouring in her photographs, favouring an acidic palette reminiscent of early colour reproductions. In her most recent series Stacey employs an exaggerated vocabulary of expressions and attitudes based on T.V. melodramas and film stills to explore the operation of power within relationships.

Fiona Hall gathers disparate objects and brings them together in the Still lives she constructs on her studio floor. She looks back to medieval images and uses black and white cut-outs of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel the Elder which she combines with contemporary objects like small plastic human figures and cookie cutters. 

While all the photographs in the exhibition work on a number of levels, Jacky Redgate's series "From the painter's book" is the most allegorical. Each image functions in specific terms as an illustration of a Dutch proverb, but also as an allegory. The size of the photographs is important as it strains the relationship to naturalism and activates the physical space the viewer occupies. The photographs in "Pure Invention" are conspicuous/y artificial. Their reality is staged. The viewer is invited to enter the pertormance with the knowledge that the photographic image is an illusion.

— Helen Ennis, 1988

PURE INVENTION was presented at 200 Gertrude Street between the 4 - 26 March 1988.