Monash Gallery of Art

Thursday 16th September 2010 we visited the MGA to see the Ponch Hawkes Photography as well as some other artists.

Ponch Hawkes was a photographer who used actors and performers for her night time photography. 

It was interesting the way she used car lights to give that particular look in her work. Her pictures usually were of random travels and featured weird things in some such as a man holding a mug, a man skipping, etc. But these peieces featured a main colour as well such as the man skipping had a blueish green top and the photo had some bottle shop glowy bits in it that were the same colour for the bottles. The man holding the mug (red) also had another red part in the picture.

Robyn Stacey had the artwork with butterflies and insects pinned down to her work, which you don't notice at first glance until you look up close. The picture looks like a fisheye lens has been used even though it is like a collage in a circular shape to give it that dimension.

We then looked at John Grollings who had the tribal pictures that had no horizons or gave no indication of where you were, he got viewers to be 'zoomed in' to the picture and be focussed on what was happening. He did alot of work from Papua New Guinea. 

Rod McNicol was a Melbourne photographer who was going blind and was having emphasema. 

He photographed graveyard stones but chose to do them in Sepia rather than black and white or colour. They were cropped rather then the whole stone, and there were different age groups of the photos he captured. Another photographer – Anne Ferran took photos of what seems to be grass, it was the grass at a woman's prison in Tasmania where pregnant women would go. the position of the artwork in the gallery needed more light so that Anne's message of looking at yourself through her photos would be shown better.

The piece however in the gallery that i enjoyed the most was the illustration of Ex de Medici. There was a hidden message of beauty in things ugly. Ex was in the Canberra Barracks for the army in Timor. 

She illustratated guns, birds, skulls and tattoo like things. The piece was done with markers and inks. 

It was fascinating to see some things smudged and done wrong such as a orange flower and some other little things, that the artwork wasn't perfect at a second glance.