JUNO GEMES – Spirit Maps
OPENING 4PM SUNDAY 16TH OF AUGUST, 2015
Visual advocacy has been the hallmark of Juno Gemes’ artistic practice for more than four decades. Her use of creative media to agitate for shared knowledge and cultural understanding has resulted in a body of photographs, film and ephemera that, although superficially disparate, are bound through the common threads of critique and compassion.
Gemes is an observer and a listener. Her images arise from careful conversation, from intuitive felt connections with her subjects and their stories.
This exhibition will bring together interweaving threads of Juno Gemes artistic journey, with two photographic series, a film, and a selection of artists notebooks.
A series of photogravure meditations reveal fresh nuances through repeated impressions of two of Gemes’ most effecting and memorable photographs. Countrymen is a timeless, iconic and lyrical image capturing a moment of pure connection, respect, and affection between three Lawmen. One with the land is a quiet family portrait, a celebration of the patience and poetry of traditional hunting and fishing, connection to country. Both of these images are the product of a privileged intimacy, Gemes and her camera silently witnessing the profoundly personal continuation of ancient culture in contemporary life.
Gemes recently collaborated with master photogravure printer Lothar Osterling at his 3rd St Studio in Brooklyn, NY, producing this group of images that reinterrogate the surfaces and resonances of the photographs.’ Charleyene Olgivie
Juno Gemes was born in Budapest, Hungary and arrived in Australia in 1949. She studied at Sydney University, worked in theatre and wrote for the International Times in London until 1971. She became involved in the Yellow House at Potts Point, Sydney and worked in Central Australia on the film Uluru (1978).
Her first solo exhibition, We Wait No More was in 1982. Gemes has spent 40 years documenting the social change of Australia, in particular the lives of Aboriginal Australians. The exhibition runs until 30th August, 2015.
