Empty Spaces

Empty Spaces - Amanda A'Hara, Leigh Martin, Sarah Eades, Karen Crisp

Space is a universal quality that everyone subconsciously experiences and negotiates as they go about their lives. Instances where we are made consciously aware of our personal relationship to the spaces around us can often be sublime or even disturbing. This exhibition brings together a selection of photography by four exciting local contemporary artists.

The 'Empty Spaces' they present offer sites of possibility. Far from being empty these photographs offer a space for the viewer to project into, to negotiate the emptiness via their imagination and memory. Appearing 'empty' by the absence of the people, animals, or elements that would ordinarily inhabit these spaces a gap is left for the viewer to ponder the construction and perimeters that define the space and define their own experiences, memories and imagination.

Leigh Martin's murky abstract spaces are voids anchored by some curious rocks. With no apparent walls to contain the space he has captured, the viewer can float around in the blue haze only returning to the anchored rocks for a sense of perspective.

Sarah Eades observes architectural spaces that are utilitarian in their concrete construction and delineation. The absence of the usual inhabitants of these spaces deny the viewer the opportunity to understand the actual scale of the spaces. Instead they are left to survey the odd accessories in an attempt to understand it.

Both Karen Crisp and Amanda A'Hara have visited the familiar environments of schools. The exterior images that Karen has framed emanate with a deep psychological consciousness. The emptiness of the spaces she presents could potentially offer freedom from the environment, yet there exists a sense of being contained and excluded. This sense is heightened by the long line of the perimeter fence and trees, and the distance of the low straight closed classroom.

While Amanda A'Hara's interior images of the school hall and storage room are full of traces of the people who frequent these spaces. The order and uniformity of the chairs waiting for the assembly to begin evoke the potentiality and purpose of the space, resonating with the viewers own memories of similar spaces. In another space a discarded apple core signals the recent presence of someone in the cluttered storage room littered with gym mats and other objects of similar purpose.

Event listed by Mark Watts

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