Exhibitions Looking Glass

01.09.17 to 15.01.18

Gregory Pryor Looking Glass, 2017, Art Gallery of Western Australia

For Looking Glass, Pryor undertook a field trip to a section of the tragic Esperance bush fires of 2015. By embedding himself in amongst the charcoal remains and taking a series of 360-degree photographic notations, Pryor formulated the idea for Looking Glass and its overwhelming immersive quality.

Similar to the phoenix like quality of the bush to re-generate after fire, Looking Glass in some ways can be seen as a reassembled landscape, articulated on 1585 sheets of paper. Pryor has worked with a team of assistants to populate each sheet with a broad vocabulary of manual marks, first working the paper in veils of watercolour, before adding the fugitive and friable layers of charcoal. Finally, thousands of small glass beads are added into this matrix of wet and dry media, contributing a reflective element to the porous and absorbent black.

A strong vertical element permeates the work, connecting the sky with the ground and often takes the form of repetitive vertical marks or ‘dragging’ in the charcoal. These fine marks find provenance for Pryor in the art conservation technique of tratteggio, which strives to articulate lost sections (lacunae) of artwork with a slightly abstracted version of what was once there. Pryor is well aware of the fragmentary nature of many of the landscapes he experiences in this part of the world, and Looking Glass endeavors to simultaneously address what is lost and what remains. This labour intensive process of drawing and rubbing out, of creating multiple perspectives from different hands, produces an immersive narrative of restoration, an exploded diagram of walking through landscape, capturing its ongoing disappearance and also its repair and renewal.

This body of work aims to involve viewers in a profoundly moving encounter with one of the oldest exposed land masses on earth.

LINKS

From Glass Beads to Smoke Water:Investigating the Vocabulary of Loss and Renewal in the Landscapes of the Yilgarn Craton

The Yilgarn Chronicles - short film by George Karpathakis

The Making of Looking Glass

Time Lapse Installation at the Art Gallery of Western Australia