Award-winning Australian documentary and art photographers Narelle Autio and Trent Parke will launch a new exhibition at Stills Gallery in Sydney in November.
A new exhibition by Narelle Autio and Trent Parke, 'To the Sea' presents two distinct perspectives of a journey taken side by side. Showing at Stills Gallery in Sydney from November 13 until December 21, To The Sea offers distinct interpretations of an ongoing road trip around Australia undertaken by these two award-winning social documentary photographers.
The trip started in 2003, when Parke and Autio drove around Australia in a road trip which they say changed their lives in more ways than one. During the trip they had their first child, Jem, and shot two series; Parke’s foreboding ‘Minutes to Midnight’ and Autio’s celebratory ‘Watercolours’.
‘To the Sea’ presents an alternative tale of that trip, and others that followed. By interweaving unseen images from the artists’ photo archive, this new story is more meandering and uncensored. The photographers describe it as ”an internal monologue of sorts”. It is about the journey more than its destinations, with the photographers responding to emotional and psychological terrain as much as their immediate physical one.
Parke’s works take shape as four individually titled photo books, with each unravelling a narrative through a trail of images. The remarkable is revealed where you’d least expect it - branches in the undergrowth, the dust cloud from a speeding vehicle, a mass moth murder at the hands of a sheet of flypaper! All are transformed from the ordinary to extraordinary, somehow abstracted. Stories are formed out of these collections of moments, with each image connecting to the next.
Playing with scale, some images are printed strikingly large, while the majority take on a storyboard quality, as strips of small, intimate works stretch sideways across the gallery wall. Within the content there is a levelling of the banal and breathtaking, where lines and light recur in vast landscapes and tiny details alike.
Autio’s work presents the outback in a way many have experienced, but few have captured. Taken at high speed through the windows of their car, images of semi-arid terrain appear smudged horizontally, like the unapologetic brushstrokes of abstract expressionist paintings. The curators say these stretches of colour dissolve details, revealing a truth, not so much about the landscape, but the emotional space of travel.
Gazing into the images is like gazing outward to a world speeding by, evoking that internal, deeply reflective space that is unique to long distance travel. For Autio, the rapidly changing scapes made visible, perhaps almost tangible, an unrelenting sense that life was moving too fast. With vibrant, loud colours she conjures this hyper reality, while subtly eliciting a complex and quiet melancholia. Other images, like flashbacks, offer still moments of clarity; a joey pauses on an endless stretch of road, while a burnt-out car is abandoned in the dust like a corpse.
Reflecting the outback’s capacity to make acute the delicate line between life and death, Autio’s work engenders a bittersweet meditation. As time stands still in one sense, it flies away in another. In ‘To the Sea’ Autio and Parke’s intuitive responses to light, and life, offer so much more than the simple documentation of a trip.
The exhibition is on at Stills Gallery, 36 Gosbell St, Paddington, Sydney, from Nov 13 to Dec 21. For further information ph: (02) 9331 7775 or visit www.stillsgallery.com.au
'Road to Gundagi' is one of a series by Narelle Autio in the joint exhibition with Trent Parke, To The Sea.
