Just back from Melbourne after a quick two-day trip to attend the opening of Antipodean Emanations: Cameraless Photography from Australia and New Zealand at Monash Gallery of Art. Curated by the MGA, the exhibition takes over from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s 2016 exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (curated by Geoffrey Batchen) and considers cameraless photography from this part of the world in more detail.
You can see from the image above that Len Lye is a strong feature, as he did with the earlier Emanations (serving as the starting point for the whole project). The MGA’s exhibition casts a wider net for artists working with cameraless photography from Australia and New Zealand, including many not seen in the earlier exhibition and many others represented by different or more examples of their work. A few examples can be seen here. I’ll write in more detail on this in a separate post. I’d expect a fair few reviews of the exhibition to turn up in coming months. Here’s the first, from Anna Dunnill at Art Guide Australia.
The publication by Geoffrey Batchen, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph continues to accompany the exhibition is its present form. A recent review has been published by CAA from Australian reviewer Natalya Hughes.
While I was in Melbourne I was able to make the last days of Runes at the Centre for Contemporary Photography. Curated by Justine Varga and Geoffrey Batchen, this was great to see alongside Emanations at the MGA as it included a few works from the Brewster’s earlier Emanations. Irrespective of that connection, this small exhibition was a fascinating group of photographs and the notion of readability.
I also had a little time to see the NGV Triennial which recently received a miserable review from the Australian, similar in tone to recent articles in the UK from Tiffany Jenkins. A more positive review is here from the Guardian.
Paul Brobbel 
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