Next Generation: Solomon Islands After RAMSI and Provenance at Photoaccess

While both these exhibitions present very differently each is (ultimately) about portraiture. Davey is concerned with the individual within the group and within that group's wider society. Dunn's images are about individuals (all artists), decontextualised and ostensibly objective, removed from the environment of their art practices. This is of course simplistic but the pairing of them opens a discourse on the nature of the portrait as individual disclosure and the portrait as representative of "the group". As such they provide an intellectual matrix that enlivens and sharpens the visitor experience.

Sean Davey's Next Generation is the result of a commission from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to document "daily life in Honiara at the end of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI)". The images taken in June and July of this year mark the end of the program and a pivotal moment in the history of the Solomon Islands. The exhibition consists of black-and-white images (mostly 60 centimetres by 90 centimetres) and a number of smaller colour prints (20 centimetres by 25 centimetres) plus some other material (tapa cloth map, excerpt from a local newspaper and a video). The overall "hang" is busy. There is a lot to take in and the somewhat eccentric placement of images literally all over the walls may be confusing to some. I found it a lively visual metaphor capturing the vitality of the people and activities depicted. The interspersion of small (coloured) images related to or expanding on what is happening in the larger images offered layered comment that placed the gravitas of what was happening to the country as a whole into an intimate, personal context, a move from the macro to the micro. I have seen Davey use "eccentric" hangs previously and the thematic and aesthetic efficacy of these is pointedly used again in the present exhibition.

Davey is a skilled and sensitive artist. The individual works (particularly the black-and-white pieces) beautifully combine objectivity and intimacy. His commissioned role may be as documenter but the artist's eye is powerfully averred throughout the exhibition. He is able to capture not only the drama of the events occurring but is able to elide these into the daily lives of the population and indeed vice versa. The quotidian continues alongside the political, the portentous nature of the latter cleverly played off against the simplicity of the former. Images of pride, national and familial, provide a true portrait of a society moving into a new era.

Geoffrey Dunn's Provenance is "a series of intimate portraits of eight Canberra artists". It is a meditation on the nature of "the gaze". Here specifically the gaze as manifested in the relationship between artist and sitter, a relationship made more complex when the sitter is also an artist. The images are open and inviting, each sitter's directness asking the viewer to look beyond the surface to the nature of the relationships as posed. Of course the viewer is inextricably part of the relationship web established by the artist. It is definitely a three-way involvement and as Marcel Duchamp so perfectly stated "it is the viewer who completes the work of art". The intimacy of the artist-sitter nexus posits the existence of an "other", and here that "other" is the viewer (or "viewers"). What they bring to this scenario is not (necessarily) known by either artist or sitter and hence imbues a level of psychological and thematic tension that Dunn carefully introduces into his nuanced portraits.

The images themselves, characterised by the directness I referred to above, are clear and crisp. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the person pictured being absolutely the subject. However the individual clarity is replete with questions and so we return to the essentially interrogative positions that portraiture adopts and that perhaps gives it its longevity in the history of art. The inclusion of Headbacks (views of the backs of the artists' heads and 8 Eyes Layered (superimposed images of the artists) indicates that Dunn is not only aesthetically questioning himself but also his sitters and us, the viewers. This is a clever exhibition. I like to be questioned, to have assumptions upset while still being aesthetically tantalised.