Composite exhibition explores the driving force behind photographic art
'Anomolies 3' by Enrico Scotece
When you next visit the University of Western Sydney Art Gallery, don’t be concerned if you get the feeling that you are being watched. For our next featured artist, observing audience reactions is an important part of the creative process.
Enrico Scotece is a prominent Sydney photographer who specialises in black and white and analogue processes. He is also a lecturer within the UWS School of Humanities and Communication Arts.
“I am always motivated by the question of why we bother making photographs,” says Mr Scotece.
“The process is more than just pushing a button and putting the result on your wall at home. Most artists have a driving force, and it’s often the desire to make people think.
“When I see people in a gallery, looking at my work, I’m always interested to seeing their reaction. If I can trace what they think, and how they feel, I’m one step closer to understanding the true impact and purpose of photography.”
Mr Scotece’s Composite exhibition opens at the UWS Art Gallery on the Werrington North campus on Thursday 11th October 2012.
The exhibition includes two distinct bodies of work – ‘Leaves of Light,’ which pulls together a series of work from an ongoing project; and ‘After the Fall,’ which deals with the viewer’s response to process, possession, and perception of the photographic image.
'Untitled' by Enrico Scotece
'Leaves of Light’ is described as the artist’s own personal journey, reflecting on a human’s relationship with the natural world through plants and the impact of urban sprawl.
In ‘After the Fall,’ each artwork is formed by mixture of disparate images – of plants, trees, chains, text, buildings and power poles – all patch-worked together on photographic paper.
Mr Scotece says his motivations for exhibiting at the UWS Art Gallery are two-fold. Firstly, the responses that he gauges from his audience will form the basis of initial research for his PhD; and secondly, he hopes that the exhibition will provide his students a new insight into the photographic medium.
“I see many students at UWS who are immensely talented, but a lot has changed since I was a student in the same Bachelor of Design (Visual Communications) degree,” says Mr Scotece.
“With developments in technology, photography has become so grounded in the digital. Students are approaching photography with the perception that everything can be done on a computer – there is no thought about how things may have been done 100 years ago.
“All of the artworks in the Composite exhibition have been created using a traditional method – with a camera that uses film, and a dark room. I hope this helps students to see that the key to professional photography is not in the technology – it is in the creative process.”
Mr Scotece will feature in a special artist talk at the official opening of the Composite exhibition from 2-4pm, on Thursday 11th October, 2012.
The UWS Art Gallery is open during office hours only (9am-5pm, Monday-Friday). The Composite exhibition is open until 14th December 2012.
The artworks in the Composite exhibition are available for sale. All of the hand printed black and white photographs in 'Leave of Light' can be reproduced, however no two will be absolutely identical to the trained eye. Each artwork in 'After The Fall' is unique and cannot be reprinted or recreated.
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