ADAM BUNNY: FIVE PHOTOGRAPHS
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Front gallery

Catalogue text by Max Delany

Adam Bunny's exhibition Five Photographs staged a contest between the real and the represented - a poetic encounter - between the materialist processes of photography and the seduction of the scene. The works featured were made using a range of technical methods. Conventional photographs shot with a camera, which made reference to a world beyond the lens, were situated alongside pictures produced, without a camera, in the darkroom process through manipulation of chemical, light and chromatics.

The scale and enigmatic content of the works in Five Photographs suggested a radiant, poetic sensibility. Their landscape format delivered a panoramic abundance, verging on the romantic, and yet, they were equally images of conjecture. Ascertain scepticism prevailed as each image was scrutinized: the spill of a slag heap, the drench of the 'process abstractions', telegraph wires taut against sky. The pleasures of illusory space yielded to the anxiety we experienced in the real space of perception. What is it that we look at and how?

Together, Adam Bunny's camera-made and camera-less images heightened the drama of the photographic image, which is at once actual and indexical, organic and technological, material and illusion. His work demonstrated that for every particle of objective detachment, there exists a counterforce of fragile beauty and volatile corrosive life.

Five Photographs was Adam bunny's first individual exhibition in Melbourne since his return from New York, where he had been working since 1996. He has held individual exhibitions at Linden Gallery 1996 and Aryle Street Studios 1994 and has been involved in a number of group shows, including the national touring exhibition, F: Divergent Abstract and the Photographic Project, organised by the Plimsoll Gallery, Center for the Arts, University of Tasmania, Hobart. His work has been published in a range of journals and newspapers, and is represented in the collection of The National Gallery of Victoria, as well as various private collections.