Look At/Look Through

‘Look At/Look Through’ is a group exhibition that explores the relationship between people and the landscape. In some works, figures with their backs turned act as surrogates for the viewer, surveying the landscape in front of them. In others, the viewer acts as an absent figure, with the work inviting them beyond the gallery to inhabit the point of view of the person observing and representing the landscape. In many works, strategies such as blurring, heightened colour and painterly gestures deny the illusion of real space, instead reorienting attention to the picture plane; the here and now.

The exhibition takes as its starting point conceptual artist Ian Burn’s statement about Indigenous landscape painter Albert Namatjira’s watercolour paintings that “the landscape itself is not the subject focused upon but instead reads as something one journeys through”. In his 1989 appropriation of one of Namatjira’s paintings Burn presented a broader, shorter version of this observation, “A LANDSCAPE IS NOT SOMETHING YOU LOOK AT BUT SOMETHING YOU LOOK THROUGH”. This work plays heavily with the idea of looking and the definition of a landscape, both broadening and narrowing what a landscape could be. In his book on the subject, Burn summarised that “(i)n twentieth-century Australia, the idea of the landscape has become more important than the landscape itself. It serves to declare an idea of place, constantly redefining difference in a changing world.”