Dark Rooms

12 July – 25 August 2018

Curator: Naomi Evans

Photographic media proliferated throughout Australia during the 1970s, following the increased affordability of snapshot cameras and colour film processing. By the 1980s, colour photography was widely used by artists, who continued to explore a range of photographic approaches and techniques, from the immediacy of ‘point-and-shoot’ techniques to staged compositions. Their work referenced narratives of history and power and appropriated artistic strategies from advertising, cinema, and the televisual. By the 1990s, computer-generated imagery and increased access to the internet offered new languages with which to address pressing issues.

Photographs made by many women artists during this period differed in a significant aspect by refusing the male gaze. Against the backdrop of the feminist movement and influential thinking and activism in arts and politics, women took authorial agency into their own hands. Acutely aware of the ways in which the lens could empower or reduce the subject, they put themselves, friends, and family in the picture, and in doing so, changed the cultural landscape of Australia. Photomedia became an important instrument through which these artists confronted racism and the objectification of peoples; disrupted and subverted sexually violent imagery; and forged a renewed interest in the tropes of psychoanalytic theory.

The Dark Rooms exhibition surveys works that are emotional and intensely charged. Evocations of intimacy, fantasy, and trauma appear alongside humorous, politically astute, and confrontational pieces.

Drawing largely on works from the Griffith University Art Collection, Dark Rooms also features loans from artists, private collections, and public institutions, including The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and HOTA : Home of the Arts, Gold Coast.

Downloadable exhibition labels