Rosemary Laing

one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape
March 25 – May 1, 2004

Familiar objects in a dreamlike landscape from far northwestern Australia are juxtaposed in Rosemary Laing’s new series of large-scale photographs: one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape. As if drawn from images in dreams and in nightmares, Laing’s photographs locate and destabilize us in a landscape devoid of humans, but marked by their presence through time. The exhibition opens to the public on Thursday, March 25, from 6 to 8 P.M. The artist will be present at the opening.

Rosemary Laing first traveled to Balgo, in northwestern Australia in 2002. Balgo was the site of numerous dramas of displacement and dispossession, which particularly affected the aboriginal artists’ community. Impressed by the seemingly inviolability of the landscape despite the havoc wreaked upon it, Laing set out to make visual metaphors which would address the “haunting of the landscape”. Modernist-looking furniture is coated with the red dust of the Australian desert, and placed throughout the landscape, appearing as hieratic sculptures, insubstantial markers against the onslaught of time. Laing also utilizes the cyclical passage of time – daybreak, full light, dusk – and the fierce and uncontrollable energy of burning – to achieve a film-like quality within the confines of a still photograph. She exploits the cinematic in a series of thrown heads in the air, which are disembodied from the land, physically as well as spiritually.

Landscape as a metaphor for the body, cultural memory and the cinematic have been a part of Laing’s previous photo based works. In flight research, bulletproofglass and groundspeed, the artist made an intervention in a seemingly bucolic landscape. one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape further develops this idea of the fiction of invention as the source for a deeper social psychological truth.

Rosemary Laing was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1959. Her practice of conceptually based photography and performance has been the subject of several survey shows, most recently at the Brisbane City Gallery in 2003. She has shown extensively in museums and galleries in Australia and Asia. In the United States, her work was most recently seen in the Worcester Art Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her photographs are represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Kunstsammlung Nordhein Westfalen, Dusseldorf, the Contemporary Art Museum, Kanazawa Japan, the Reina Sofia, Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, among others. Recent museum shows include Face Up, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, the 12th Sydney Biennale, and Memory and Landscape at the Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain. The Centro De Arte Salamanca, Spain is organizing a mid-career survey show of her work for 2004. In May 2004 Aperture will publish a photo essay on one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape, accompanied by a text by Abigail Solomon-Godeau.

Rosemary Laing unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape continues through May 1, 2004.
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 to 6
For further information contact: Mark Hughes at 212 315 0470 [email protected]

Forthcoming exhibition: Ana Mendieta Film Works 1973-1980