7 August – 18 September
The Perth Centre for Photography is pleased to present Digital Dérive, by Paul Sutherland opening 6 pm, Friday 6 August 2021. Please RSVP to the opening here.
Digital Dérive is a body of work produced during a residency at the Perth Centre for Photography between July and September 2020, providing light-hearted speculation on the role of the flaneur or street photographer during a period of travel restrictions and lockdown. For this series, Sutherland adopted the role of a “digital flaneur”, strolling through international cities on Google Street View, looking for scenes that were deemed photogenic and taking screenshots as he went. He then amassed a collection of images, split them into pieces, projected them onto a stretched bed sheet with an array of rudimentary analogue projectors, and rephotographed them. This convoluted recursive image-making process allows the work to bounce between digital, analogue and digital again, muddying the relationship between the original referents and the final works. The distorted imagery creates a surreal, uncanny and nostalgic mood, especially as Street View necessarily provides users with a snapshot of locations at prior points in time. As a result of going on digital dérives and processing his findings in an idiosyncratic and obscure manner, the images are dream-like, whimsical, and maybe a bit empty or hollow, as if something is always missing.
Paul Sutherland is a photographer and artist based in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia). At the core of his practice, Sutherland is concerned with photography in the expanded field, working diversely between print, photo-sculpture, video, performance and affective installation. Sutherland aims to produce work inviting the audience to think a bit deeper about what it means to photograph or be photographed, and what the limits could be of the photographic medium. At the same time, Sutherland maintains a recognisably dreamy and ambiguous aesthetic in his photographic print work, utilising various recursive image-making processes as a significant creative methodology.
