Firstdraft
August 2017
“Authentic Sand from Wolf Creek! makes a great addition to any Horror buff ’s collection. small quantity available!!! very rare!!!”
In early 2015 I found a listing on Ebay selling sand from the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater as a prop from the 2005 feature film Wolf Creek. I purchased the sand and set up a Skype interview with the sellers.They were backpackers travelling around Australia who had decided to visit the crater after seeing the film. In describing their experience of the crater, the backpackers frequently attempted to articulate a feeling of dissonance, where they felt awkwardly caught between the film’s representations of a landscape that they were experiencing first-hand. One of the backpackers, Arnaud, described this perfectly when he stumbled mid-sentence saying, “how is the crater, the image?”
The exhibition “How is the Crater, the Image”’ is concerned with the affect of generic, populist and widely disseminated imagery on sublime landscapes.The exhibition considers the push and pull between images and objects as they relate to landscapes colonised by their image, including the Wolfe Creek Crater and the Marianas Trench.
is an ongoing series of stones and boulders collected by the artist and painted to resemble their graphic representation in mainstream comics.
From sites in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria,NSW, London, Newcastle, Como.
enamel on limestone, granite, sandstone, basalt, scoria, quartz,marble, pumice.
is a live simulation of the area of the Pacific ocean above the Marianas Trench, controlled by the weather of the Marianas Trench region. (when it is windy there, it is windy in the game).
It is rendered to look like descriptions of Solaris (1961 Lem) and representations of Solaris (Tarkovsky 1972), (Soderbergh, Cameron 2002) which is a fictional sentient planet made of water, that Stanislaw Lem intended to be “something that cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images."
A sample of sand bought by Oliver from backpackers over ebay as a prop from the film Wolfcreek (2005, Mclean) apparently taken from The Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater in around 2012.
Throughout the exhibition the sand slowly falls through the shelf it sits upon and disperses through the gallery.
Sand,leaves,stones, Acrylic, hardwood, geological sieve mesh.
This sand sample is also used in the video work 298000 BC & 2005 AD & 2013 AD.