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November 24, 2013
The exhibition ‘Rainshadow’ at the Prospect Gallery in Adelaide features photographs of an escarpment on Greg John's Palmer property in the eastern Mount Lofty Ranges between Mannum on the Murray River and Mount Pleasant. To the east of the escarpment lies the Murray River and a thousand miles of flat country until the western edge of the Great Dividing Range.
The photos in the exhibition were made by five artists---Peter Lindon, Sandra Starkey Simon, Willem Versteegh, Michael Kluvanek and Bill Morrow. The exhibition was curated by Ian Hamilton.
Willem Versteegh, untitled, Rainshadow
This image of a gnarled she-oak suggests survival under difficult climatic conditions: thin soil, strong winds and low rainfall. It is a denuded landscape--one that is stripped bare by European settlement to enable the grazing of sheep and cattle. It's a depressing landscape but an interesting one.
What I found interesting about the exhibition was how the landscape was interpreted in a non-Romantic way ---ie., without the standard contrast between image and symbol.
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