We see things not as they are, but as we are LISA GARLAND EXHIBITION: 10 OCTOBER - 15 NOVEMBER 2015 CONTEMPORARY ART TASMANIA GALLERY

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1 We see things not as they are, but as we are LISA GARLAND EXHIBITION: 10 OCTOBER - 15 NOVEMBER 2015 CONTEMPORARY ART TASMANIA GALLERY Woolnorth Dude, 2013

LISA GARLAND: NOT SO DARK Lisa Garland has been making photographic portraits of her family, friends and acquaintances in Tasmania s northwest since the mid 1990s.

2 LISA GARLAND: NOT SO DARK Lisa Garland has been making photographic portraits of her family, friends and acquaintances in Tasmania s northwest since the mid 1990s. She makes formal portraits and still-lifes that are stark and unglamorous. Garland takes us away from the current obsession with the public image, a time where we are meme-ed beyond belief. In these works there is a completely different, more confronting self-consciousness to the ubiquity of the Selfie, Facebook, Photoshop, Instagram and Kik. A patched and bound cactus struggles to gain supremacy in a garden of filled with oppositional species. Surrounded by talismans - the blanket, an alarm clock, tanning lotion, transistor radio and thongs, an older man steals sunlight in a protected part of the beach. A waterfall of synthetic fabrics, pictures of Saint Anthony and loved ones protectively frame a woman in foetal position who looks directly at us through the lens. Similarly ceramic dogs and birds soften the husband and wife photographed in their spacious lounge room. One subject sports much loved runners, the other wears socks. In a surprisingly barren domestic environment a young man in a hoody captivates with his steely gaze - here s trouble maybe. Wounded Cactus, 2015

3 LISA GARLAND: NOT SO DARK In the late 14th century portraits were devised as memento-moris, reminders of fleeting nature and the vanities of life. Over time the portrait became an exercise in elegant fiction glamorized and idealized representations of mostly rich people for future audiences. The invention of photography and the infinite detail the lens provides shifted the genre entirely, throwing in to high relief the relations inherent in the creation of the image. While Garland s work draws on a number of key antecedents in the photographic portrait genre from Jacob Riis to Katy Grannan, the specific locus of her practice distinguishes these works from those more wellknown figures. She combines the traditions of environmental and ethnographic documentary photography to great effect. Garland employs the continuing almost primal frisson of black and white, of tones, highlights and shadows to reveal and to frame a little known scion of Australian culture, the northwest of Tasmania. Still relatively isolated this is a tough, terrible and beautiful part of the island. An insider, her work gives a functional coherence to people and place. Auntie Lettie, 2013 It is in the family home that our world and our personalities begin and play out. With Garland we are given permission to enter various domestic environments some are fortresses, some are in decay, all have tinges of the ideal. We see again just what accumulative and incremental creatures humans are. With Garland we are regaled by the importance of objects and spaces to the individual and the constructions of personality. The home is the space of habituation, the vast powerhouse generator of memories we cannot let go.

LISA GARLAND: NOT SO DARK Patrick, Pistol, Gerry, Reg, 2010 Formally, memory is described by science as the reactivation of electrical signals from previously encoded data across networks of nerve

4 LISA GARLAND: NOT SO DARK Patrick, Pistol, Gerry, Reg, 2010 Formally, memory is described by science as the reactivation of electrical signals from previously encoded data across networks of nerve cells that reside in specific areas of the brain; the hippocampus for long term memories while in the prefrontal cortex are active or more immediate memories and tasks before being filtered for storage. The acts of remembering are our identity. Our sense of our selves is solely dependent on the particular bundle of stories we choose tell to ourselves at any moment in time. Every act of memory is conjuring. So the site of the domestic home is the magician s hat from which we all draw. Moved by his mother s enduring Alzheimer s disease, Luis Buñuel wrote, Life without memory is no life at all, just as intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing. For Andre Breton humans were memory s playthings. Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying there the profound M with which the word Memory begins. There is definitely a certain bleakness to the world that Garland depicts. However it is the level of intimacy in the work that is both fascinating and disquieting. In many ways the work in this exhibition is not only a testament to the artist s eye but also to Garlands unique social skills. In the production of any successful photographic portrait there is always an element of a mise-en-scene in as in Hollywood Western, the classic Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. More politely it is a meeting similar to the first encounter of the psychoanalyst and the patient.

5 LISA GARLAND: NOT SO DARK Whereas many contemporary photographers spectacularize prurient or culturally problematic states of living and being Garland clearly admires and has an empathic engagement with her often very different, perhaps eccentric subjects. We cannot be more aware of the patient processes of negotiation between the artist and subjects as to site/location and pose. As Gaston Bachelard another Surrealist presciently explains in The Poetics of Space, A creature that hides and withdraws into it s shell is preparing a way out by staying in the motionlessness of it s shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds of being. In an uncanny way these extraordinary images are as revelatory as they are empowering. Craig Judd LIST OF WORKS Kim s Shack, 2015 Marlene, 2013 Duck Plot, 2015 Mr Atkins Garden, 2015 Peter s Phonebook, 2015 Reg, 2015 Patrick, Pistol, Gerry, Reg, x 305mm Wounded Cactus, x 740mm Shane and Taz, 2014 Auntie Lettie, x 305mm Inglis Palms, 2015 Jesse s Fireplace, 2015 Woolnorth Dude, 2013 Peter s Dining Room, 2015 Paste-up: Wally s Garden, 2005

Lisa Garland holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Tasmanian School of Art (1992) and a Diploma of Education. She currently teaches photography at Hellyer College in Burnie, Tasmania.

In 2007 she was awarded the Moorilla Prize (now the MONA Scholarship).

6 Lisa Garland holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Tasmanian School of Art (1992) and a Diploma of Education. She currently teaches photography at Hellyer College in Burnie, Tasmania. She has been shortlisted for the National Photographic Portrait Prize, the Hobart City Art Prize and the City of Devonport Art Award. In 2007 she was awarded the Moorilla Prize (now the MONA Scholarship). Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the University of Tasmania, Burnie Regional Art Gallery, Devonport Regional Art Gallery and MONA. Garland is represented by Despard Gallery, Hobart. Contemporary Art Tasmania 27 Tasma Street, North Hobart, Tasmania info@contemporaryart.org.au Contemporary Art Tasmania is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments, and is assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts. Contemporary Art Tasmania, the artists and authors, 2015

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