This project reconnects with, and builds upon, the abstract photographic tradition in Australia, whose roots lie in the 1960s, but which appears to have been displaced and forgotten. Australian Abstractions proposes an engagement with the forces that drive and organise the abstract image in the Nietzschean sense of forces presenting themselves in the aesthetic sphere in the sense of manifesting themselves in the image.
The reference is to Gilles Deleuze who holds that the relationships between the concept, perception, and affects follow a combinatorial logic, in which no element is privileged over and above any of the others. This allows for the Deleuzian “‘flux’ of perpetual change.” Deleuze regards art as a matter of recombining and objectivizing elements whose status remains co-equal. None of these is the ground for any of the others: there is no priority, implicit or otherwise, of concept over percept or affect, and so for all these terms.
Art is the site where percept, concept, and affect combine like the threads of a fabric whose strands are completely interwoven with one another.
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[…] the cut is that I decided that there would be no abstractions in the exhibition, given my 2015 Australian Abstraction exhibition at the Light Gallery in Adelaide during the SALA Festival. Another reason for […]