Greg Neville’s work

Behind the Gare Saint Lazare in 2016

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                                                Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint Lazare, 1932

In late 2016 I made a pilgrimage to the Gare St Lazare, the Paris train station where Henri Cartier-Bresson made his fateful snap in 1932.

This was the first photograph that hit me with the potential of photography, that “light bulb moment”. Seeing it as a teenager at the old National Gallery of Victoria I thought to myself “Oh, so you can do this with photography.”

              About where that man is walking, 24 year old Henri held his camera up against the fence and pressed the shutter just as an unknown man leapt across the puddle. It is a trivial moment captured for ever, with all the elements caught in a perfect equilibrium. 

A review of Justin Art House Museum

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I’ve been mentioned in a review of the exhibition Digital: The World of Alternative Realities. This is at the new Justin Art House Museum in Prahran,

The review is in Artlink magazine, which covers contemporary art and ideas from the Asia-Pacific. Click here to read the full article, written by Emily Cormack. Here’s the part where my work is mentioned:

Greg Neville in his work GoooOg (2012) uses satellite images sourced from Google Earth and reconfigured as mirrored, symmetrical compositions. These configurations treat the terrain as raw material, offering a new order completely unrelated to the towns and cities represented in the sourced images. 

In both Neville and Haley’s works the terrain depicted is irrelevant, the material reality of the stock or Google Earth image is discarded in favour of the artist’s creative schema. This is not appropriation, it is more like Baudrillard’s retelling of Borge’s fable of the cartographers who drew up a map so detailed that it covered the land represented so that the “territory no longer precedes the map.

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I’m at the Justin Art House Museum

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jahm

The Justin Art House Museum is opening tonight with this exhibition, Digital: the World of Alternative Realities. I’m one of the artists in this exhibition of contemporary digital art from the collection of Leah and Charles Justin. The galleries where the collection is on display share space in their extraordinary Prahran home. The museum is open to the public on Sundays and Wednesdays, click here for details.

“The works are predominantly non-figurative and abstract. The collection includes a diverse spectrum of art practice including painting, sculpture, works on and from paper, and photography.”

“This exhibition will explore the virtual worlds constructed by the artists, examining the notions of alternate universes, dystopian visions, through to providing social commentary on our existing world.”

screen-shot-2017-02-16-at-6-45-52-pm

The work I have in the show is from my Gooog series of a couple of years ago: 

“The online software programme Google Earth is a vast mapping and surveillance project. Combined with Google Street View, it is the most ambitious photographic project in history. Through a simple mirroring process, the endless twisting and looping highways that criss-cross the planet become beautiful decorative designs, like tapestries or Persian carpets.”

gooog

That description leaves out a dystopian element to the work, because I wanted to create a beautiful representation of pointlessness. The images in Gooog are screen-captures of looping highways from Google Earth. The patterend effect was intended to create an image of futile, circling journeys like the pattern of ant paths seen from above.

The Gooog image sits well in the company on the gallery walls, as other works in the show share the same unsettling vision of the planet. Yang Yongliang, Gregory Bennett, Stephen Haley and others envision the world in vast repeating patterns of human settlement and behaviour. But not all of it is threatening. In his opening address, Charles Justin talked about the dilemma of taking a pessimistic or optimistic view of the earth’s future, joking that “a pessimist is an optimist who is a realist!”

In his opening speech, the acclaimed scientist professor Tim Flannery, linked the digital art processes in the show to the body’s own digitally encoded DNA, which produces the body’s protein. He made poetic observations about DNA, a digital system, producing the analogue protein and fat of the human brain, which in turn devises its own digital calculations for producing art.

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Lacock Abbey in Autumn

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lacock-1bLacock Abbey, where Henry Fox Talbot invented photography, is surrounded by its beautiful grounds – a very English park with orchard and greenhouse, winding paths and grazing sheep. If you’re lucky you can eat apples from his apple trees as I did.

Talbot made outdoor exposures with his new invention – what we call analogue photography – in the 1840s in this very place. It hasn’t changed much in the intervening years and he would have seen more or less what you see here. The photographs were taken on a cool autumn day with the trees in full colour.

lacock-8lacock-3lacock-2lacock-9   lacock-10lacock-4        All photographs by Greg Neville, 2016

Atget and me

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atget-pantheon                              Eugene Atget, Coin de la rue Valette et Panthéon, 1925                   gn-pantheon                               Greg Neville, Coin de la rue Valette et Panthéon, 2016

Atget’s streets, then and now. An exercise to locate some of the places where Eugene Atget had taken his photographs in the early 20th century.

Finding the locations was not hard, they are pretty much unchanged. But the  atmosphere of the 19th century streetscape has changed, it could not withstand the transformation brought on by the car which imposes its 20th century mechanical discord and turns every street into a carpark. 

Atget used a glass plate view camera with perspective-correcting movements, hence the vertical buildings are vertical. Also, he used a very wide angle lens, the normal apparatus of an architectural photographer, and was able to squeeze in the expanse of the street. My lens is a 35mm equivalent and does not take in as much. 

These photos of mine show Atget’s artistry. You can see what he’s made of the subject, compared to what I have not. Granted it’s Paris, but he still had to find the location and its best viewpoint. His photographs are indelible to the memory, they have a unique atmosphere and poignancy; he brings out a character in the street that is not there to the eye. Atget was writing poetry.

At certain moments, this little exercise was a thrill. Standing in that doorway in the Rue de Seine to line up my camera, I realised I was in the exact spot  the great photographer had stood with his camera in 1924. I was occupying the same space as Eugene Atget had done almost a century before.

243430816_be36ba3238_b                                                           Eugene Atget, Rue Domat                                            gn-rue-domat                                                  Greg Neville, Rue Domat, 2016

eugene_atget_coin_rue_de_seine                                               Eugene Atget, Rue de Seine, 1924gn-rue-de-seine                                                          Greg Neville, Rue de Seine, 2016

atget-quaid-anjou-1924                         Eugene Atget, Quai d’Anjou, 1924atget-quai-danjou

gn-quai-danjou                                    Greg Neville, Quai d’Anjou, 2016

Manifold is Passing By

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Manifold-1

“Manifold: of many kinds or varieties; varied or diverse in appearance, form, or character; numerous and abundant.

Tacit gallery is showing some prints from my Manifold series in a group show called Passing By. The photographs are close ups of weathered stone and rusting iron on 19th century graves. They were shot on black & white film with a Bronica medium format camera – yes, analogue.

Passing By is the fifth annual show with a group of friends who are former students of mine. Each year we choose a title and work independently to interpret it photographically. Past titles were Bound by Books, Momentary, Folded and After Words.

The Manifold images interpret the theme of “passing by” through the evocative surfaces of 19th century gravestones. The family name on one gravestone, Manifold, suggests the many lives and deaths commemorated in that cemetery. It stand for the brief lives poignantly commemorated there, the people who “passed by.”

The exhibition is at Tacit Contemporay Art in Abbotsford, and runs from October 5 to 16..

Manifold-5

1971 – Waiting man

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G.N.-Man-&-Shadow-1971     Greg Neville, Waiting man, 1971

This man is from a now extinct species, a type of buttoned-up character who was common in the 1950s and 60s. When this picture was taken, vast numbers of men wore suits to work every day, even to the most ordinary jobs.

I like the balance of the composition, and the man’s still, watchful pose. But it didn’t take me long to realize the shadow can be interpreted in an obscene way. You can’t not see it now, can you?