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College of Fine Arts | The University of New South Wales - Sydney - Australia
One Thing Leads to Another | The College of Fine Arts
One Thing Leads to Another | The College of Fine Arts
In her new exhibition
One thing leads to another Debra Phillips presents a set
of images that quietly declare the inexhaustible list of possibilities for photography as a
fundamentally eclectic, accumulative and associative pursuit. These new photographs invite their
own moment of intimate encounter in order to celebrate unexpected associations and conceptual
links. Each photograph presented here is not only a discrete memory trace of a place, a moment, a
person, an emotion or thought, but also a trigger to another image; a point in a relay of
associations that layer and deepen our experience of the world about us as a place of possibility,
wonder and perplexity.
One thing leads to another evolves from and reveals the
fundamentally accumulative condition of Phillips' practice. Phillips is an artist who photographs
objects in collections, takes urban street photographs, travels to produce large format field
studies and produces studio photographs. In some instances the resulting images fuel an expanding
archive of people, places, actions, objects and views; a glance on the street, a body reclined on a
chair, a funny expression glimpsed, a sky long studied, a shifting shadow on brickwork, a child's
toy, an expansive landscape view, a diagram copied from an old book. Their potential meanings shift
and settle and compound in ever-changing relationships to other images and the world about them.
They are material forms of observation, inscription and thought that occasionally find a public
life in exhibition and installation contexts, triggering unusual relations and meanings. In other
instances the images are more deliberately produced as elements within visual systems and
structures intended for immediate exhibition. In either case, dialogues emerge between individual
components within series of work, and between the different series. All Phillips' work investigates
connections between different representational technologies and their relationships to specific
cultural and historical circumstance. Fundamentally, her photographs operate at a nexus of
intuition and intellectual provocation and celebrate the fluidity of being-in-the-world.
Opening: Friday 4 June, 6-8om
Running: 2-26 June
Location: Boutwell Draper Gallery, 82-84 George Street,
Redfern, Phone: 9310 5662.