neither here nor there is a collaborative installation by artists Guy Grabowsky, Kiah Pullens and production and lighting designer Ashley Buchanan, created in response to Sutton Projects’ secondary function as an artwork storage facility. The installation draws on this environment to examine photography’s ability to document and archive, scrutinize expectations and dependency on the medium, while questioning its capacity to warp our perception of time. Bringing together sculptural interventions and abstract imagery, with the materials and aesthetics of construction, neither here nor there will convert Sutton Projects into a quasi-dilapidated space that resembles a building site, or archaeological dig; a liminal zone that is either falling apart or coming together.
neither here nor there is an official exhibition of PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography.
Melbourne-based artist Kiah Pullens works with sculpture and primarily analogue photography. Pullens re-energises archival images through the performative gestures of hand printing in the darkroom. Inserting her own body into the image making process, Pullens is interested in the performance she instills in her photographs and how people navigate them. Her works are composed of images sourced from an array of Australian and artistic histories and are reinvented as large scale analogue installations that question how we see and experience photography.
Pullens graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2019. She has been awarded a number of prizes including Best Analogue Image, CCP Salon (2019), Evans Family Award for Photography (2018) and Exposure National Student Showcase Prize (2018 and 2017). Pullens was selected to represent The Victorian College of the Arts at the National Graduate Exhibition, Hatched, hosted by Perth Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. Selected solo exhibitions include WOW, Women of the West, Five Walls Gallery Melbourne, 2019. Selected group exhibitions: Transitions, Rotterdam Photography Festival, The Netherlands, 2020; Performing Textiles, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2019; Develop, Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, 2019; BSIDE Fundraiser, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne, 2019; Majlis Travelling Scholarship, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne 2018.
Guy Grabowsky is a Melbourne-based artist working with analogue photography. Grabowsky’s interest lies in the photographic medium — all aspects of its evolvement, its role in our shifting realities, how it ‘looks’ at us and how we perceive its usefulness. Grabowsky creates photographs with and without the camera, using unconventional and traditional analogue/digital techniques. Negatives are treated as found objects; the original narrative behind the moment of capture becomes irrelevant. Through intervention and grouping, each image is provided with a new narrative and conceptual framework. The work often tests Grabowsky’s perception of an unstable reality often present in the ubiquitous image. In Grabowsky’s images this ambiguous response continually evolves—the hand is present, causing destruction to reveal a new authenticity, a new Image. Emphasis is placed upon the photograph’s textural surface and the underlying resonances it points to.
Grabowsky graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. He has participated in numerous and solo exhibitions and has been a recipient various prizes, including the Plumm Wine Glass awards (2018), Mount Buller Residency (2017) and the Fiona Myer Award (2017). Selected exhibitions include Symbionts, STATION, Melbourne, (2020); Deep Breakfast, Hayden’s, Melbourne, (2020); 1805, Alpine Central, Mount Buller, (2019); Glass Eye, Lon Gallery, Melbourne (2019); Image Reader, Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2019); Develop, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2019); Beyond the Veil, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne (2018); Untitled Spaces, Kings Artist-Run, Melbourne (2018); “Yet Another Image”, Bus Projects, Melbourne (2018); Transit, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne (2017); past/present, Trocadero Art Space, Melbourne (2017); Majlis Travelling Scholarship, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne (2017). Grabowsky’s work is held in numerous private and public collections in Australia including the Joyce Nissan, Myer Family Collection and Melbourne University George Paton collection.