How to find yourself in a world made of images

Presenting new work created during a recent PhotoAccess residency, this striking exhibition explores the fluid condition of contemporary images. Departing from a single ‘Find My Phone’ screenshot, Macafee integrates darkroom, digital and craft processes to investigate how images flux between data and object and circulate across time and space, providing an unstable truth but also endless possibilities for connections, relationships and identities.

In the first days of her residency at PhotoAccess, reflecting on the temptation to investigate what her children were up to back home in Melbourne, Macafee ran her ‘Find My Phone’ app. She took a screenshot of the resulting satellite view of inner south Canberra. This image – de-constructed into data – became the core material for each of the works in this exhibition.

Photograms embody colour fields taken from the original screenshot, while lumen prints incorporate organic fragments Macafee collected on her daily walk from EAST Hotel to PhotoAccess. A video installation features ink made from burnt excess map cuttings, misprints and artist notes. Canberra Spinners and Weavers archive images, printed and impregnated with colours, have been spun into threads. These lead to a ‘soak’ made with Find My Phone colour information, sampled, printed and applied to the gallery wall.

Through integrating darkroom, digital and craft techniques to exhaustively extend a single capture, Macafee explores how images now flux constantly between data and object, simultaneously inhabiting multiple states, sites and spaces. Macafee suggests the unstable truth of images, and associated states of being, but also their potential for the re-making of connections, relationships and identities.

Artist Workshop: Spinning Images 
Join Kirsty for a hands-on one-day workshop exploring intersections between craft techniques and contemporary image making processes. Construct, de-construct and re-construct your images, taking them from data to spun photo-thread.

10am to 4pm Saturday 28 September 2019, for all the details and to enrol, head to our workshops page.