The Spectral Scape
5 May to 3 June 2023

The Spectral Scape
5 May to 3 June 2023

Carolyn Craig, Damian Dillon, Clare Humphries, Roy Lee, David Manley, Justine Roche

Contemporary strategies of ‘hauntology’ and the spectre are used by the artists to consider history as a site of complicit erasure and resurrection, where place is perceived as a complex habitation of ghosted pasts and presents.

Hauntology is a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida to describe the paradoxical relationship between presence and absence, or being and non-being. In broader philosophical terms, hauntology challenges the idea of a fixed and stable identity, and suggests that the past continues to haunt the present in ways that are not always immediately apparent. It is a way of thinking about the ways history, memory, and identity are all intertwined and in constant flux.

The works of the artists engage with the relationship between photography, memory, and the passage of time, and often seek to evoke a sense of the uncanny or otherworldly through the use of imagery and technique. In activating a practice of spectrality, the artists re-compose dominant historical narratives through methodologies of trace, refraction, distortion and diffusion. These strategies are recomposed into new spectral entities of affect and resistance. The artists are unified through a material interest in lens-based practices, and how the history of photography is linked with practices that define both the landscape and capital economies that extract from place.

(Image above: Clare Humphries Prospectus Australis (with feet opposite), 2023, Ink and dry pigment on paper (detail).)

Images courtesy and © the artists

Photography GCS Gallery