HEAD ON at DISORDER
Disorder Gallery is excited to be a part of the 2020 Head On Photo Festival. The little gallery behind Door 108 will host featured exhibitions from two different international artists, bringing a bit of the wide world to Sydney this November.
NIGHTS AS INEXORABLE AS THE SEA
Diana Nicholette Jeon
Dreams are quirky phenomena. In that liminal space between memory, perception, and the subconscious, they confront me with situations I can’t explain, often fraught with absurdities and illogical occurrences. I rarely remember entire dream sequences; instead, I find myself left with confused snippets. Like the boxes of pictures kept in tins in a drawer...a collection of pictures I barely recognize, yet somehow relate to as having experienced. Awake, I am left wondering - was it really a dream, or a previously forgotten bit of a random memory?
PROCESS: As the referents are ephemeral things, I have placed these images in tins – simulations of the old tins in which people stored photographs and mementos, a collection of visions they sorted through, sifted over and sometimes shared.
Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning contemporary artist who lives and works in Honolulu, Hawaii. She holds an MFA from University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Jeon's art has received four Hawaii SFCA Purchase Awards, the International Photo Award, 11th Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Pollux Award, and the Mobile Photo Award, among others, and has been featured in Gente di Fotografia, SHOTS Magazine, Pf Magazine, the Art Photo Index, and Lens Culture.
THE UNKNOWING...X
RICHARD SAWDON SMITH
Over the years, I have amassed a huge dressing up box, which I have accumulated from different parts of my life. Aids patient to university professor, gender bender to porn star, go-go dancer to boxer/wrestler, drag queen to leather queen, son to daddy!
As I approach my sixth decade, I’m reflecting on past lives and the unknown of the future. I am dipping into the dressing up box to create new and potentially different roles, all the time playing with gender, identity, sexuality, subjectivity, masculinity, and everything in between. This series is very much about play, of unthinking in a place of unknowing – an exciting place where anything can happen and nothing is predetermined.
The ‘X’ of Unknowing can be a kiss from me to you, a reference to non-binary, non-gendered specific pronouns, or referring to an undetermined place/space both literally and metaphorically. ‘Un...’ could also refer to Undetectable equals Untransmissable. A place I have been for a long time. Diagnosed HIV+ in 1994 before effective highly active antiretroviral therapy was available, I started medication in 2005 and have been undetectable ever since. Now the world is waking up slowly to U=U, although the stigma remains and needs to be challenged.
These ideas are the subconscious thoughts in my head but the work is intended to be about living, the future and fun!!
Professor Richard Sawdon Smith is an internationally exhibiting and award-winning British photographer. He is Dean of Arts & Media at Norwich University of the Arts, UK and a former winner of the National Portrait Gallery London, Photographic Portrait Award. He is a Patron of the Norwich Film Festival, Trustee of the Council of Higher Education for Art and Design, a board member of The bookRoom Press & Archive and member of the Editorial Advisory Panel of the Journal of Photography & Culture, and of the Visual AIDS Archive New York. He is Co-editor of Langford’s Basic Photography and The Book is Alive!. His photographs and writing are widely published.
The work of Richard Swandon Smith will be on display from November 12th through November 28th
The work of Diana Nicholette Jeon will be on display from November 25th through December at Disorder Gallery.