Saline

Debra Phillips | PHOTO 2024

Void_Melbourne

01 - 30 March 2024

In the exhibition Saline at Void_Melbourne Debra Phillips premieres recent photographs and printed matter from a larger series of work exploring connections between industry and landscape, economics and ecology, technology and the natural world. This work extends Phillips’ interest in systems of knowledge and the ways in which their intersections with daily life generate questions around history-making, economics, geography and politics.

The exhibition features a suite of large-scale colour photographs of plants and fragments of garden. Utilising digital post-production and print processes to crystallise the digital within material form, these images can appear visually unstable, functioning in a loop of visual coherence and dissolution, slipping back and forth from something readily recognised and accepted as a photograph to something read as sitting in a blurred space between photography and data visualisation. Simultaneously pictorial views and camouflage surfaces, these photographs have the capacity to unsettle assumptions regarding the apprehension and consumption of photographic images and their relationship to the material world. All the while their intensity of saturated colour, nudging nature into artificiality, evokes the toxic intensity of our climate crisis.

These photographs were originally sourced by the artist in a visit to the Royal Saltworks of Chaux at Arc-et-Senans, France. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Royal Saltworks was built between 1775 and 1779 by the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux as an ideal factory town consisting of 11 buildings used for the production and warehousing of salt, related trades, and workers’ homes. During this visit Phillips photographed the temporary summer gardens—The travellers’ gardens—surrounding the historic buildings. Designed in collaboration with school children responding to themes associated with imaginary travels and ideal worlds, these gardens wrap around the stone legacy of Ledoux’s ideal factory town, manifesting a changing, seasonal environment that recognizes adaptability and responsiveness to the climate and environmental conditions as a necessary if ideal, even utopian approach to future living.

A supplement in two parts accompanies the photographic works. Each is presented as an incomplete pictorial grid on a print poster. Part A details a selection of photographs Phillips made at the gardens of the Royal Saltworks that document a variety of plants including ornamental, medicinal, herbal, toxic, edible as well as ground covers, trees, shrubs, grasses, etc. Part B presents a set of images of stone vessels from the walls of Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks buildings that themselves represent a documentation of salt extraction and production: saline water being poured from urns into evaporating pans. Together these two prints constitute a photographic record of Phillips’ semi-circular navigation of the Royal Saltworks and its gardens. One features moments in the lifecycle of the gardens, the other the passage of working water fixed in stone akin to 3-D photographic images. They are offered to visitors to take away for later reference, scrutiny and discussion outside of the exhibition framework, a form of slow release and dispersal of the work and its generative ideas.

All these elements considered in relation to each other—the large colour photographs, the two print posters and the one smaller black and white analogue print depicting a Ledoux architectural model, a world within a world—highlight the way in which Phillips’ practice draws attention to photography’s structures of representation, convention and classification, as well as its materiality.

Debra Phillips was born in Naarm/Melbourne and lives and works in Sydney on Gadigal land. She has exhibited extensively, including in major group exhibitions such as Australian Perspecta (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1993), Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography! (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 1996), Perfect for every occasion: photography today (Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2007), Contemporary Australia: Optimism (Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, 2008-09), Photography and place: Australian landscape photography 1970s until now (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2011), The Mnemonic Mirror (University of Technology Gallery, 2016; Griffith Art Museum, 2017), and Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 To Now (National Gallery of Australia, 2021-22). Recent solo exhibitions include Debra Phillips: Loupe (Artspace, Sydney, 2023-24) and Debra Phillips: A talker’s echo (The Cross Art Projects, Sydney, 2023). Her work is held in a range of significant public collections including Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. Phillips was the recipient of the biennial National Photography Prize at Murray Art Museum Albury (2020). She is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at University of New South Wales, Art & Design. Phillips is represented by Mais Wright Gallery, Sydney