EXHIBITION: THE LAKE

Being an ocean person, I’ve always been uneasy with the murky, seemingly bottomlessness of inland bodies of water. The Lake, an exhibition of works by ten contemporary Australian photo-media artists created around such waterways, did little to assuage my fears. A persuasive curatorial narrative, emphasising an art-historical conception of the Australian landscape as a ‘haunted wilderness’, draws the individual works together. In a spiral-like configuration the exhibition moves from light to dark. Rebecca Dagnall’s faintly playful mediations on suburban wildernesses give way to images of isolation and tumult – perfectly relayed by David McDowell’s interactive piece seescape – until, at last, David Mackenzie and Craig Bender’s Long Acre Fire Trail, with it’s quietly murderous undertones, elicited in me the vaguest hint of terror. Many of these works feel deeply personal, images of memory and imagination that invite you to see not simply the surface, but what lies beneath.

 Until Oct 10, Australian Centre for Photography, 257 Oxford St Paddington, 9332 1455 or acp.org.au

BY BREE PICKERING