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May 20, 2008
Philip Hunter has an exhibition at the Tim Olsen Gallery in Woolahra Sydney. The work in this show, entitled Lines in the Dirt, continues the themes of his earlier work --the idea of a layered landscape as a nightscape.
Philip Hunter, Ocean Floor - Inland, 2007
Peter Corrigan's exhibition catalogue talks in terms of the work enabling us to reflect on a shadow world that eludes our everyday reality. Does it refer to the shadow world of Bill Henson
No. The shadow world for Corrigan is represented in terms of immaterial reality, imaginary terrain close to the universe of dreams, and Hunter's engagement with the metaphysical that reveals a netherworld. For Corrigan metaphysical implies spiritual in a country that has lost its understanding of 'shaman' and lacks faith.
We are a long way from photography's representation of the landscape, however much that representation is informed by Romanticism. But then again no--Hunter's work is not so much interested in place per se, as in an experience of place. How would photography do that?
Philip Hunter, Night Plains 12, 2008
My reading of the work is that of a landscape in the tradition of Sidney Nolan's or Authur Boyd' s Wimmera or Fred Williams' landscapes: a representation haunted by water --or rather the lack of it---as in the history of the colonial explorers imaginings of a vast inland sea in central Australia; or the salt pans of today; or arid landscapes shaped by receding water.
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