Heide Museum of Modern Art

Perfect for every occasion

Photography today

17 March - 1 July 2007

Venue: Heide III: Central Galleries

Curator: Zara Stanhope

Surrounding us in the mass media and advertising, let alone the visual arts, photography incessantly informs our sense of who we are. Digital technologies have facilitated the creation of an immeasurable abundance of images, along with the establishment of corporatised archives that act as repositories of visual information and history. Perfect for every occasion: photography today surveys new practice in Australian photography in the twenty-first century.

The exhibition showcases eighteen Australian artists, presenting a total of 59 works. The artists are: Andrew Best, Gary Carsley, Rozalind Drummond, Cherine Fahd, Chantal Faust, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Alex Kershaw, Mark Kimber, Geoff Kleem, Paul Knight, Vanila Netto, Debra Phillips, Patrick Pound, Sarah Ryan, Darren Sylvester, Simon Terrill and Justene Williams. 

In art of the 1990s, photography was generally characterised by large scale, high resolution, cinematographic images that variously acknowledged the veracity of the camera lens as a record of reality or as a vehicle of the mind’s eye. As a constantly evolving medium, more recently photography has been described as ‘performative’, suggesting that photo-media artists are deliberately allowing their subjectivities to show.

Perfect for every occasion acknowledges the pervasiveness of media in our environment and offers the opportunity to contemplate how photography provides a means to convey the tensions between contemporary public and private realities. These images suggest that the camera, whether digital or analogue, large format or a mobile phone, is a tool for processing trajectories of thought as much as an eye witness.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding and advisory body