About the exhibition
EXHIBITION
Jennifer Lade explores the relationship of the human body to the environment in a world increasingly dominated by the screen. Based in photography, these Photomedia works' narrative is developed through the use of digital technology.
Drawing on past work in sculpture and painting Jennifer's current works in photomedia interweave real-space and digital-space practices. Underlying her work is an interest in the integration of virtual sensory experiences and the corporeal world.
The 39 works in the Exhibition are printed on conservation quality Cotton Rag Paper using Archival Ink. These collaged images were created by the artist using a range of traditional and digital photographic practices; we have used the general term 'Photomedia' to describe this range.
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Accompanying Narrative by Jennifer Lade
Part 1 The Flood
The rain continued for days before the sun finally broke through
The water had risen 14 metres
The last time was in 1780
Coral proliferated along the banks of the Murray
Part 2 Mirage
A cloud of insects rose from the cliff
The sun beat down
Further below it was cooler
Part 3 Lost Horizons
It was fabulous in the garden and we stayed forever
Part 4 Transfiguration
It took a long time to get there
We tried to stuff the cracks with rags
We didn’t understand the jokes
Beautiful diseases
Part 5 Overhang
They talked all through the performance
Jazz
Double Bass
Black Velvet
Turbulence
The western wall
They held a feast day when the Pink Lakes were harvested
Part 6 The Caryatids came away…
Smeared with soft clay
They waited for their cue
Reeds
Snow
They read Chaucer to each other as they watched the tide turning
The Lake
Flood Light by Jennifer Lade, February 2011
Stories of survival and tragedy have become commonplace in recent months in response to a wave of natural disasters that have rocked Australia and the region. After being exposed to the bright lights of worldwide attention, the reconstruction of lives begins again where it is impossible to return to the day before. Individually and collectively trauma must be set aside to get on with the reality of the next day.
In this context Jennifer Lade’s exhibition ‘Flood Light’ holds a particular resonance. While much of the work was completed in 2010, this exhibition connects personal ‘felt-in-the-body’ calamity with a wider foreboding about the impact of major climate change events.
Jennifer brings layers of experience to her work in both form and content. Her educational trajectory through politics and philosophy, sculpture and painting, digital art and games are apparent in her work. Grounded in photographic imagery then building creatively from it, the work explores the ambiguous and elusive qualities of light that characterize and infuse the experience of working in the digital realm. She brings both her work process and the content back to the impact that is felt and expressed in the corporeal body.
In 1984 Jennifer was kidnapped in Pakistan, which resulted in eight months imprisonment in Afghanistan. It was the first of a series of sudden and unexpected events that played out in slow motion over the following decades. Unlike the initial wave of adrenalin, these events did not pass through, but carved their legacy into her body’s landscape.
The narrative and accompanying series of images in ‘Flood Light’ explore the process of an individual responding to a radically changing reality. The response is one of vulnerability and resilience rather than that of heroism and solutions.
Situated in Australia in the aftermath of a major flood (hypothetical at the time of making the images) ‘Flood Light’ refers to an historic major flood along the Murray River that took place eight years prior to the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia.
Throughout this series of works the dimensions of time encompasses the different spans of individuals, of western culture, of climate and of geology - connecting cyclic events of the past with the present.
Specific photographic descriptions of place metamorphose into the creations of the imagination and their inscriptions onto the body. Although faces are seldom seen, a human presence ties the narrative to the individual, the couple, and the collective presence.
The journey takes the reader/viewer from the landscape through the domestic and the garden, into the darkness and beyond to the city, before returning to the swamp at the edge of the lake and the unknown future.
A feeling of sadness and a seeping regret underlies a foreboding about a collective inability to conserve an environment that has moved, or will move, majestically beyond the reach of human effort.
