The Gallery Cassandra Bird’s annual Summer Salon is on, and after a pause for festivities, will continue to show at the cosy King’s Cross space until February. The exhibition draws from the lived legacy of 19th-Century European salons and their architectural settings, where art was shown in intimate, communal spaces, that often sparked new ideas and cultural debates. Traditionally hosted in private residencies or galleries, these salons were as much about the sensory experience of sound, words, performance, and gesture as they were about the exchange of knowledge, serving as vibrant open spaces for artists, writers, poets, and thinkers.
The group show is entitled The Voyage – See Our Reality Anew and is described by the gallery as “Both a physical journey and a reimagining of how the fabric of history and art intertwine, transforming our perception of time and place. The exhibition welcomes viewers to step into flashes of history—vibrant, charged fragments that pulse with energy and meaning. These dynamic constellations—from the revolutionary currents of the 19th century to the emergent modern era—trace the routes where ideas and artistic visions intersect and redefine the human experience.
Each chapter of history becomes not a fixed narrative but a confluence of voices, where understanding of time collapses, and fragments of past and present converge to reveal new questions and possibilities. What we experience are not linear stories, but constellations of moments—each one alive with potential, layered with connections waiting to be discovered.”
The work of six artists is included. Osvaldo Budet teaches drawing at the National Art School, and his work explores colonialism & post-colonialism. In the show, he has an interesting chess board and pieces, alongside a drawing, as well as a colonial book, and videos are on display that he has produced with Shonah Trescott. Shonah Trescott also has a series of climate informed works, with moving depictions of disasters alongside quotes taken from writings and speeches made about the crises. Paul Davies has some gorgeously intricate and detailed works created from hand-cut stencils. David Griggs has some both playful and political ink and charcoal works, and Jedda-Daisy Culley’s huge gestural paintings are both sweeping and epic, and intimate.
And finally Laura Moore, who has five works in the show, all of which are themselves editions of five. Each piece is entitled Sun Trail, and the images have been created from marking the path the Sun takes through the skies, captured with a pinhole camera, and reproduced in glorious burnt blues and pinks. Irresistible sat down with Laura once the show was up, to find out where her journeys with the Sun are taking her.
Working with pinhole cameras and light is really going back to the fundamentals of photography and almost the birth of photomedia images. How exiting is it to bring a new dynamism to old techniques and what does those technical and historical references mean to you?
“These works are created using a pinhole camera and large format colour film (4×5). Photography is constantly changing and many, if not most of those changes, are driven by technology. I am not nostalgic about photography’s analogue technologies nor am I scared of modern digital or even AI technologies. These are just all tools at my disposal, that I will use when needed and with the right concept. For example, when I was getting a lot of questions in artist talks about mobile phone photography, and if it was ‘destroying photography,’ I responded by making my work Likeness, where I made studio portraits of teenagers using my phone, and then put my phone in the enlarger and used darkroom technologies to create large scale black and white prints from a phone screen instead of a negative.Â
The exciting part of these new works was working out how to make it possible. It is very difficult to make extremely long exposures, some weeks at a time, looking directly at the sun. The pinhole camera was part of this, as a very small pinhole lets in very little light, but using film was another element that made this work possible. This work was only possible because of the Reciprocity failure that occurs in film photography with long exposures. Reciprocity failure does not occur in digital photography. My decision to use these older analogue technologies was because they made these images possible.Â
So yes, it was very exciting to find a way to make these images and very exciting every time a got to see a processed negative. There was a lot of experimentation, failures and learning, but it was thrilling to see a negative was a success. Working with film does require more patience than digital but then you get the suspense.”
(Editor’s Note: Reciprocity is the inverse relationship between the intensity and duration of light that determines the reaction of light-sensitive material. Reciprocity failure is when this direct relationship between exposure and time breaks down at the extremes of light exposure, high and low, and occurs at different points for different films. See here.)
Your earlier works looked a lot at portraiture. Obviously, the Sun Trails are more about space and time. Do you imagine that as a natural progression, a subatomic almost kind of portraiture, or are you moving in another direction?
“This series is very much a continuation of my previous works. Although my previous works have all been conceptual portraiture, they all share a focus on time, memory and histories, combined with the technologies and limitations and confinements of photography as a medium. And I am always playing with photography’s problematic relationship to truth. In my work HereinbeforeI (the crying school girls), I recreate the school portrait. School portraits are very much a marker of time, children’s growth and personal histories.Â
The Sun has also been a recurring theme in my work. In my work From Plato’s Cave, I’m playing with Plato’s allegory of the Sun, with the idea of truth in sunlight, while exploiting a limitation of photography – its inability to capture detail in extreme contrast situations. In that work the body is lit using only direct sunlight entering the domestic interior via a window or door. If you were in the room when those images were made your eyes would be able to see the body and the room interior, but the camera can’t record such contrast in light and anything not lit by the sunlight falls to black.
Similar to my new work in the current exhibition, in my previous work Window, a time lapses video work, I am recording the movement of sunlight over the duration of a day as the female subject is suspended within that moving time.Â
The works in this exhibition are from an unfinished series titled Never Look Directly at the Sun. The works are images of the sun as it travels across the sky, but instead of recording the more scientific linear idea of time, I have intervened and changed the placement of the camera for every exposure. This almost playful intervention, or deception, of moving the camera for each exposure, breaks from the scientific recording of time as linear, making this recording of time something else, and I hope something more. A more human experience of time, memory and histories. The experience of moments that overlap or cross, moments that stand as alone and pivotal, or different moments that together form new understandings. Really the way time exists in our memories and histories.”
Curatorially it’s a great fit with the exhibition. How do you feel the works sit in the particular physical context of The Gallery Cassandra Bird?
“I look at all the work in this exhibition and I can see where time is overlapped and combined to remake ideas of histories. When fundamentally life changing moments have sparked deep explorations, or where an initial idea has grown, expanded, and shifted during the process of making. I can see small intimate works that show big communal shared experiences. All of our works together create an expansive dialogue of what time, histories and memory are and can be. All held by a building where you can’t help but imagine its own long and I’m sure diverse history. A building that in its latest reinvention is housing a young and exciting gallery, fostering ideas, discussion and engagement.”
SUMMER SALON: The Voyage – See Our Reality Anew
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CASSANDRA BIRD
54 Kellett St, Potts Point 2011
Sydney, NSW Australia
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