Someone Else’s Here
by Alex Wisser
“Someone Else’s Here” begins at the interface between self and world that manifests when one takes or even looks at a photograph. Where does the subject begin and end, where the machine, where the medium, where the world? Who makes a photograph when the majority of the decisions that fill its frame are made by someone other than the photographer? Does the perceiver stand on the periphery of what they perceive, or do they stand in the middle of it? Is an intervention necessary to the making of an image or is the making of an image necessarily an intervention? These questions press against the membrane of the photographic picture plane until they spill out into the world they interrogate, only to find themselves still there, blinking, stupid, without answer
OUTSIDE IN (KANDOS)
This a photographic project exploring the identity of the town of Kandos, NSW in terms of its exteriority (the outskirts of the town) and its interiority (the inside of its residents’ homes). The diptychs presented attempt to create a continuity between the inside and the outside that is impossible, staging the rupture of passage between these two spaces in its abrupt finality. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition reminds us of the porous and complex relationship between inside and outside, between is and is not that is the lived foundation of any achievable sense of identity. To read Ann Finegan’s review of this work: kandosprojects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/alex-wisser/
BLANK CANVAS
‘BlankCanvas’ is a photographic series of homes that have been lived in for more than 30 years taken on the day of their sale by auction. These photographs capture the decorative decisions layered decade upon decade and the traces of the lives lived within these interiors. The potency of these scenes is rendered salient by the fact that they are taken on the day of their sale and within the awareness that this will result in their ultimate erasure through renovation. Thirty years of one person’s life is another person’s blank canvas.
The printing of this series was made possible by a grant from Marrickville council
The Brickworks:
I am standing in a public place, holding a brick outstretched in my hands. This simple act disrupts the normal smooth functioning of the space, causing a reaction that reveals what otherwise would have passed unnoticed. At times I feel like I am holding open the aperture through which you experience the recorded scene.
Identity Politics
All of this material was sourced from a single pile of household detritus placed in a discrete pile on the sidewalk on council collection day. I treat the pile as an art kit. Using all of the material provided and nothing but the material provided, I create a composition. I don’t know what the audience gets out of it, but I enjoy the deep engagement with this rubbish, the need to question each object as to what it is and what it means, could come to mean and what else it could mean: who did it belong to and what would it feel like to place it in this position relative to some other thing. Should I create a narrative? Should I abstract it into a formal element? Why don’t I just leave it as what it already was? All of the problems of art present themselves as I struggle to resolve the work into some kind of coherence, which, when it comes, brings with it the rewarding sense that I have redeemed something… if only a little bit and for a little while.
Alex Wisser 