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Abstract
Recent challenges to contemporary art practice are based in a critique that draws upon sub-cultural performance strategies in order to question assumptions concerning identity and aesthetics. Such research seeks to borrow from popular entertainment pastimes like karaoke and drag — not merely as actions, but as modes of translation and, by extension, of creative authorship. The deconstructive methodologies and appropriation strategies extracted out of these performance traditions can provide a useful model for working with inter-related reproductive technologies such as cameras, scanners and computers.
This research project refers back to the daguerreotype — a seminal, large-scale photographic technique that uses iodised copperplates and a camera obscura to produce photographic monotypes. Gary Carsley calls these “draguerrotypes”, large park-scape photographic images intricately produced via the process of digitally compositing photographed faux timber paneling in such a way as to produce an entirely unique pictorial composition.
This work investigates the overlap between nature and culture, locating the public park or garden in the framework for living culture comparable to the collection in a museum. For this commission from the Ministry of Justice, New South Wales Attorney-General's Department, Carsley had to work at an unprecedented scale, utilising the services of both an architecture firm and advanced computing technologies to carry out the commission.