"My work is about space and the light that inhabits it"
Unsurprisingly, it's the immersive ones that make the greatest impression - the 'ganzfeld' (complete field) "Virtuality squared" (2014) in which groups of eight or so at a time stand and wander through a large room for a timed session (about 7 or 8 minutes) as lights project all around including a concealed 2 metre drop at one end of the room, the 'wedgework' "After Green", 1993 (in fact an extremely dark room, against one wall of which is projected a series of red and violet outline squares appearing to be ramifying portals into the distance) and the similarly dark "Orca" (1984), in which the projected light images are only a muted grey against the black, creating an experience more contemplative and focused on mortality than merely sombre or depressing. All offer that kind of experience that art, and art alone, can elicit and create.
Then, too, there are the less fully physically enclosed, yet - once you focus on them - equally enveloping other projections, given abstract names ("Afrum") and distinguished by colour, with some actually projected in rooms and others rendered in etched aquatint on paper in series.
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As well as a range of others, including, in perhaps the retrospective's simplest but also some of its greatest pleasures, the three reflective holograms (blue, green, red), seeming to emerge three-dimensionally from their black backdrops.
Elsewhere in the NGA, "Myth and memory in recent American landscape photography" which, despite its title, focused on the 1970s. Naturally, I liked it - especially those by Robert Adams and Frank Gohlke.
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And, miscellaneously across the rest of the galleries: Anne Ferran's "Scenes on the Death of Nature" I and II (1986), John Olsen's "Childhood by the seaport" (1965), a couple of the Australian surrealist pieces (Freda Robertshaw's "Composition", 1947 and James Cant's "The Deserted City", 1939), the curved room with a whole lot of Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings, two Rothkos (that I also spent some time with the last time I was in Canberra, a few years back), "Blue Poles".
Unsurprisingly, it's the immersive ones that make the greatest impression - the 'ganzfeld' (complete field) "Virtuality squared" (2014) in which groups of eight or so at a time stand and wander through a large room for a timed session (about 7 or 8 minutes) as lights project all around including a concealed 2 metre drop at one end of the room, the 'wedgework' "After Green", 1993 (in fact an extremely dark room, against one wall of which is projected a series of red and violet outline squares appearing to be ramifying portals into the distance) and the similarly dark "Orca" (1984), in which the projected light images are only a muted grey against the black, creating an experience more contemplative and focused on mortality than merely sombre or depressing. All offer that kind of experience that art, and art alone, can elicit and create.
Then, too, there are the less fully physically enclosed, yet - once you focus on them - equally enveloping other projections, given abstract names ("Afrum") and distinguished by colour, with some actually projected in rooms and others rendered in etched aquatint on paper in series.
As well as a range of others, including, in perhaps the retrospective's simplest but also some of its greatest pleasures, the three reflective holograms (blue, green, red), seeming to emerge three-dimensionally from their black backdrops.
* * *
Elsewhere in the NGA, "Myth and memory in recent American landscape photography" which, despite its title, focused on the 1970s. Naturally, I liked it - especially those by Robert Adams and Frank Gohlke.
And, miscellaneously across the rest of the galleries: Anne Ferran's "Scenes on the Death of Nature" I and II (1986), John Olsen's "Childhood by the seaport" (1965), a couple of the Australian surrealist pieces (Freda Robertshaw's "Composition", 1947 and James Cant's "The Deserted City", 1939), the curved room with a whole lot of Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings, two Rothkos (that I also spent some time with the last time I was in Canberra, a few years back), "Blue Poles".
