28 SEPTEMBER - 22 OCTOBER 2022
FRONT GALLERY

DAMIAN DILLON
AN IDEAL FOR LIVING

Where cities evolve in contentious circumstances and make the transition from a colonial to a post colonial state aspects of the urban landscape such as city plans and urban design initiatives take on particular significance. This series looks at the invisible social, cultural and geographical architectures we inhabit, in particular the urban, suburban and natural environments where colonial erasure and national mythologies have failed to turn space into place as Australia remains both ‘unsettling and unsettled’. The colonising representations of the immured family home and its intrusion and consumption of the natural environment is at the core of Bourgeois CHA CHA. This series uses a Derridean process of deconstruction to interrogate the structural discourse of the home – its representations and ideations - to capture the entropic ruinous state of post-colonial Australia. The crude and grainy images from makeshift cameras and lenses are not intended as an unmediated objective piece of reality . Initial images are deconstructed and reconstructed through chemical and digital processes to dissolve the abject boundary between object and subject - in a process of visual ‘undoing’. This opens up a fragmented affectual space that reflects our occupancy (built and un-built) of the propagated landscape. The work dissects the materials of post colonial invasion - the matter that defines ownership of space and place - tethered to a failure within contemporary desire, and explores the contemporary relationship between duration video and durational still images in current Photomedia dialogue.

ARTIST BIO

Damian Dillon is a Sydney based artist who works across photography, installation and video. Dillon’s Photomedia practice deconstructs digital and analogue processes to consider how representational practices over the landscape inform a postcolonial comprehension of place. Current research considers how the abject can be distilled into the photographic plane (both chemically and aesthetically) to enact affect in the viewer-subject relation.

Dillon has a Bachelor’s degree from Sydney College of the Arts, and a Master’s degree from the College of Fine Arts NSW. He has been a recipient of grants and prizes including the COFA Postgraduate Award, Australia Council New Work Grant, NAVA and Pat Corrigan Grant, Sydney Myer Fellowship and City of Sydney Cultural Grant. He has won the Blacktown Art Prize and his work is in the collection of Artbank. He is a co-director of schmickcontemporary gallery Sydney and is currently doing a residency in Reykjavik Iceland.