Aishah Kenton: Second Exit. Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. Until January 25.
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Goulburn Regional Art Gallery is an easy day trip from Canberra and other parts of our region. There are two spaces, 1 and the smaller 2. The artists showing in Gallery 2 are always local to Goulburn. A new Window space curated by volunteers presents works from the permanent collection, encouraging visitors to peer "through the looking glass", as did Alice; and explore what lies beyond.
Canberra photographer Aishah Kenton's exhibition is in Gallery 2. A graduate of the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University (majoring in photography), Kenton was the 2018 recipient of the Emerging Art Support Scheme Award from the Goulburn gallery for her exhibition To Whom It May Concern (2018). This is not Kenton's first solo exhibition. She previously held one in 2018 at the now closed TPR Gallery in Canberra.
In words to accompany a limited edition book of this exhibition, Sven Knudsen says, "Second Exit is a stark, albeit colourful deviation from the intimate black and white photographs Kenton produced for her graduating exhibition, and reveals that this talented young artist is equally adept in using colour as she is black and white."
There are 41 unmatted images to view. Three of them - each showing her husband partially under their car - are repeated in considerably larger framed prints on an adjacent wall.
She shot on 35mm colour film, then made digital archival pigment prints to display. Capturing moments from her personal environment, Kenton's images reach for and find an elusive present. They examine the richness of colour she found across regional and remote areas of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland; places previously unfamiliar to her.
Subjects weren't chosen to represent a particular theme relating to an Australian bush narrative. Kenton's says her only intention was to explore the medium of colour photography itself. It just so happened that this recent interest in recording colour coincided with a planned road trip with her husband, the couple travelling more than 10,000 kilometres across south-east Australia in just under two months.
Promotional material on Kenton's website bookstore proclaims that the diary "will forever be associated with the artist's first visit through the Australian interior". It tells us, "Kenton's photographs are the results of her own visual investigations, a fixed lens showing things as they are and as she saw them; unromantic and sparse, loving and full of life."
She never fails to appreciate her found subjects. Moments many others would ignore - such as filling up the car and a towel on a caravan door - didn't escape her interest. Other shots explore things I too would have seen - colourful old buildings, the contents of a ute's tray, the words "Please enter" on the doors of an apparently closed shop.
A blog I read recently posed the question, "Make, take or find: how should we describe the act of photography?" For me, we should start with looking, then we need to see and, finally, respond to what we have seen when we are creating our images. So I am delighted that the acts of looking, seeing and responding are at the centre of Kenton's photography here. An image of the reverse side of a road sign, stark white against a rich red and black sky, beautifully illustrates this.
I look forward to seeing more work by this emerging photographer/artist.