Exhibitions

Biannual Façade Commission

Working with media as diverse as photography, sculpture, scent and food, artist James Tylor draws from his Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna), Māori (Te Arawa), Anglo-Celtic, Dutch and Norwegian ancestry to explore Indigenous and colonial histories. Through artworks grounded in knowledge of the past, Tylor explores the continuous effects of 19th-century Australian colonial practices on our cultural identity and environment. 

For his commission, Tylor has revisited a trope from an earlier series titled (Deleted scenes) From an untouched landscape (2013). In this series, geometric shapes dominate the foreground of black-and-white photographs of landscapes. Alternately rectangular, square and circular, the shapes are affronting in their incongruity against photographs of empty fields, rolling hills or rugged coastlines. Each image is notable for the absence of people. Tylor disrupts the surface of his digital images through physical intervention, by cutting and positioning a given shape. For this commission, a rectangle has been physically cut from the adhesive vinyl that covers the glass. On the reverse side of the glass, black vinyl deepens the sense of erasure. 

Image: James Tylor, From an untouched landscape, 2023, digital photograph on adhesive vinyl. © James Tylor. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Leon Schoots