Eliza Hutchison
Melbourne
2019
Displayed 2019 at Art Gallery of New South Wales
Eliza Hutchison
Born 1965, Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives and works Melbourne
Eliza Hutchison’s interests lie in exploring our complex and psychological relationship to the photographic image and its indexical relation to human experience. Her ‘photographic storyboards’ and their relative arrangements are conceived much like poetry, using an idiosyncratic databank of personal and media/cultural images through various processes of digital and in-camera abstraction. These photographic processes highlight the latent content of original images while also recognising the elasticity of an image. Hutchison explores photography’s potential to create poetic and fractured narratives that engage with the present cultural context. Her work defies simple explanation, confounding memory and nostalgia.
Artist text
by Dan Rule
My daughter appears in the frame, her face softly illuminated – a sunset pink. I am outside the car and she is in, the window’s reflection – a screen of foregrounds, coloured space and detail. She has eyes only for her phone.
My abutting memory pictures a crowd looking skyward – unsure of the disaster they’re about to witness.
At the turn of the decade, German artist Hito Steyerl’s now iconic film In Free Fall (2010) and Belgian/British artist Mishka Henner’s series of meticulously stitched together Google Earth images (2010–13), which rendered the vast industrial feedlots and oil fields of North America in shocking detail, offered what seemed an incredibly convincing reflection on the both the Anthropocene and a distinctly contemporary way of seeing the world. This new perspective and visual language – one born of the satellite – essentially mimicked the sensation of hurtling downward. The perceptual device that is the horizon had irrevocably changed.
I am the Challenger disaster, I am a horse fall, I am Joe Biden, I am a Trump party reveller. I am pixels.
While made only a few years ago, Steyerl’s and Henner’s appraisals – harrowing or otherwise – seem almost quaint by comparison to Eliza Hutchison’s clash, confluence and cacophony of image frames, remnants and digital matter. Her fractured and glitched photographic storyboards work to compress and shatter both the deeply personal and intrinsically cultural. They cusp on the fugue, offering only flashes of clarity, before morphing, blending and breaking apart in scattershot. They make for a confronting, yet poetic, treatise on our current state of affairs – our ocean of images.
The world is a machine we’ve built to come undone. As the fragments splay beyond our reach, I grasp only at tenderness.
Hutchison creates neither self-portraits nor cultural snapshots. Rather, she gestures towards an associative and relational autobiography of digital images. She frees the present socio-political trauma from the didactic to instead instil her own deep read – one that plays out in the form of a visual and psychological sensation. Her images speak to one another, just as they speak to us. They are digital – they aestheticise the glitch, the stutter and the loading screen – just as we are ourselves now digital. Somewhat in line with the late French philosopher and visual theorist Paul Virilio, Hutchison trawls the debris left by the technology of our own demise. She searches for human sensibility, relation and rhythm within an unfathomable contextual dissonance.
I am a crash test, I am a sand dune, I am innocence, malevolence and tension, I am the consequences of actions. I am pixels.
For Hutchison, the singular photograph is little more than a vestige. The solitary virtuosic image is no longer the form via which we process the world. Hutchison’s works are sequences, bled, echoed and blended; they are poems. As we recite, we unearth reflections and refractions of our very moment.