Photography / “Dark Matter 2023” exhibitions by Isabella Capezio, Rowena Crowe, Odette England and Janhavi Salvi. At the Huw Davies Gallery until December 2. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

THIS exhibition features works generated by four artists during their PhotoAccess 2023 “Dark Matter” residencies.

The results are exploratory, focused, mature and technically highly competent.

The glue linking the four sets of works seems to be the analogue darkroom processes enabled by the residencies. The artists deploy juxtapositions extensively. All four use historical artefacts to generate insights about both the past and the present.

Finally, each artist explores the ways in which their photographic tools and the materiality of their outputs mediate perception and “reality”. Not by accident, the tactile results contrast strongly with the evanescent mirages of our digiverse.

Rowena Crowe deploys an entirely new technique, coupling the use of a hand-held 16 mm motion camera with the insertion of Letraset items during the printing process. The resulting works are an innovative variation on the theme of the “medium is the message”. The results are uncanny – the prints look abstracted from reality yet intimately familiar. The Letraset arabesques are alluring. Aesthetically, Crowe’s prints are highly satisfying.

Isabella Capezio applies a conceptual judo throw to North’s 1980 “Canberra Suite” landscape images. Using both a suck-it-and-see process towards developing better and better colour prints along with engagement from assorted Canberrans, Capezio’s imagery replaces North’s objective distances with the personal and familiar.

The audio, featuring “ordinary” Canberrans discussing the prints, generates both insight and comfort. Canberra’s places “out there” are replaced by the places where we live and feel. The results are both intriguing and emotionally comforting: here we live; here we are who we are.

Odette England examines the complexities of her relationship with her daughter using images of her daughter coupled with found pieces of wood, some splintered, which are used to cover parts of the prints. An ominous black ribbon hangs off the frame of one of the works.

One of England’s themes is the increasing visibility of a growing young woman compared with the disappearing social visibility of an ageing woman. I found the psychological intensity to be unsettling.

Janhavi Salvi examines her experience of growing up in India and moving to, and living in, Australia. The main focus is the bureaucratic mediation between life in India and official permission to reside in Australia.

Salvi uses three sets of juxtapositions. The first is an overlay of the texts of official migration documents printed on to mirrors.

In 1963 the Bronx Zoo placed a sign “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World” over a large mirror. Here, viewers (the citizens whose governments make the migration rules) see both the texts of the documents and their own faces.

The second juxtaposition consists of a series of official “window” envelopes with images of Indian life printed on half of each envelope. The third is a video projection of street life in an Indian landscape next to an Australian cityscape.

Although the country contrasts are powerful, Salvi envisions past life in India and current life in Australia as an “and” rather than as an ‘”either or”. For Salvi, whatever the challenges, individuals accumulate meaning and richness by migrating.

In her launch speech Penelope Grist referred to the power of residencies to liberate artists from current states. Residencies do so by dislocating and relocating the artists, thereby generating bursts of intense creativity.

The works here are a wonderful testament to just that.