A selection of photographs based on the human figure.  All have cryptic or implied narrative elements.

Collaborative artists Aziz+Cucher  digitally manipulate their images to overlay architectural elements with human skin. They blur the distinctions between the human body and its environment; the exterior and the interior as well as the organic and the artificial or man-made.
The New York based Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher have been collaborating on and exhibiting digital photography, sculpture, video and architectural installation works since 1991 and are considered pioneers in the field of digital imaging, with exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, National Gallery in Berlin and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
 
Christopher Bucklow’s works from his “Guest” series of pin-hole photographs are images of people who recur in his dreams. He maintains a dream diary and psychologists tell us that everyone in our dreams reflects an aspect of ourselves. So, in a way, these figures as a group represent fragments of a single self.

Bucklow made the first exposures using a giant thirty by forty-inch plate camera on the roof of the Victoria and Albert Museum where he was then working as an art historian in the prints and drawings department. The first groups he posed were friends - the painter Peter Schuyff, the photographic artists Adam Fuss, Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller.
The process of making the “Guest” images is a cross between photography and drawing. Each ‘cell’ of light in the figure is a photographic image of the sun’s disc. The blue field around the figure is an image of the sky. Precisely where all the solar images fall on the photographic paper inside the camera is determined by Bucklow’s ‘drawing’ of a human silhouette with pinhole apertures on the front of the camera. The actual paper that was inside becomes the artwork. There is no negative and no enlargement. The English artist has works in major collections such as MOMA in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,  the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to name a few and has had exhibitions in private and institutional galleries around the world.

Alex Chomicz tells stories.  Shots of commonplace scenes from everyday life or simply a swim in a pool are charged with tension and transformed into potentially fraught dramas by his annotations of fractured lines of torch light around and connecting the ‘players’.  Printing on to metallic paper highlights the perception of these works as cinematic stills from a protracted celluloid performance.

Janice Kuzkowski’s videos are portraits of people ’in extremis’. The artist provokes her subjects, often herself, to reveal their instinctive reactions and vulnerabilities by applying mild forms of torture to stimulate these reactions.  Electric shocks and pressurised air are among means used to choreograph these intuitive and primal facial expressions in her subjects.  The images prompt us to watch in fascinated thrall and question “who, where and most particularly why?”

Tatjana Plitt admits that as a teenager she was addicted to love and to a guilty obsession with the romantic fictions of Mills & Boon. These days she creates her own compelling romantic vignettes from real life stories of love, emotion and human relationships, albeit with a touch of post teen cynicism.

Plitt sources her volunteers through placing advertisements in her local newspaper. She enlists their willing participation in her recreations of deliberately and self-consciously posed scenes of ‘true romance’.  At times she shoots and prints images in the same size as a page from a Mills & Boon novel.

Sylvia Schwenk creates socially based interventions performed in the urban landscape of different cities by local participants. All performances are photographed and a selection of these works is exhibited. The artist regards performance as a form of reconnecting art and life and integrates locations between and in buildings, the human body and performance to create awareness, discussion and engagement with important social issues through participation.

Sylvia Schwenk seeks people who generally do not go to galleries or museums and from different demographics, to take part in the performances. She directs and choreographs with a fun and light-hearted approach, to engender positive experiences for the performers and passers-by that unwittingly become actors in the shared public space of the intervention. 

Recent works include her series of ‘X Performances’; large and individual “ X’s” made of human bodies, in the middle of road intersections in Sydney, Saigon and Cologne, which address social issues including sense of community and freedom of expression.