2019. The Far Country
Narrative is a decoy. In these fifteen new works, images from different contexts and timeframes—sourced from the artists’ encounters with museums and research centres, from books, journals, postcards, electronic media, as well as their own personal travel photographs and family archives—are re-created, layered, and collaged to form new, woven realities that trigger new memories and old meanings. References ranging from Gerhard Richter’s painting of 9/11, a pair of now vanishing Gouldian Finches, a ship carrying young Australian soldiers to war in 1941, a snapshot taken by Green’s father during the bombing of Darwin in 1941, refugees fleeing across high Kurdish mountains, and a photograph taken by the artists in 2014 at Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, Timor-Leste, recording the site of a massacre, all float in meticulously painted, superimposed trompe l’oeil. Deliberately difficult to read as narrative, this flow of information and images presents us with the beauty of the physical world and human forces that collide against it. The artists’ personal memories are juxtaposed with contemporary and historical images of conscience and humanitarianism, exploring the way in which our experience frays alongside collective memory.