Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, 13 August-2nd October 2022. Yvette Hamilton is a PhD Candidate in Art History and Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney.
Space, Time, Light is an exhibition of new works by Blue Mountains artist Yvette Hamilton, based around her recent artist residency where she researched the Transit of Venus observation at Woodford Academy that occurred in 1874. This historical observation held great significance for astronomy and the photographic medium, but ultimately, was deemed a failure, and all photographic plates from this observation have been lost.
The works in the exhibition take a speculative response to these lost and failed images and draw together astronomy and photography with their shared anchor points of space, time and light – probing the gaps between vision, image and knowledge. Moving across time and space and using methodologies from the past and the present, this expanded photographic installation explores the seen and the unseen.
Exploring the unseen and the unphotographable, at a time when everything is seen and photographed; Hamilton's practice sits at the edges of the photographic medium and explores the way that it shapes human vision and its relationship to the real.
Yvette Hamilton is an Australian interdisciplinary artist and academic of Mauritian descent working on the unceded lands of the Dharug and Gundungurra people. Hamilton is Associate Lecturer in Photography and the Moving Image at UNSW Art and Design and a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney. Her work has been shown in Australia and overseas at Pingyao International Festival of Photography, Lewisham Arthouse London, Perth Centre for Photography, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Olsen Gallery, Sydney.
Installation photographs: Silversalt Photography