GAVIN HIPKINS: SECOND EMPIRE (THE PASSAGE), 2008

Starkwhite is pleased to present Second Empire (The Passage), 2008 by Gavin Hipkins from 6 October to I November 2008.

Second Empire, along with his recent Empire works, marks a shift from Hipkins' earlier photographic series to appropriation-based, camera-less image capture technologies and methodologies. He says: "With a certain medium ambiguity these new works simply constitute 'pictures'. I like to think of these recent works as 'memories of photographs', alluding to the ubiquity of the landscape photograph and its exhaustion as mnemonic function as well as my own experiential and media-filtered travel experiences and dreamed memories."

Second Empire takes its initial backdrops from a series of popular travel books, published in the late nineteenth century by the Religious Tract Society, charting architectural features and landscape wonders from European countries and the Mediterranean, along with pictorial surveys of the new world including 'American Pictures', 'Canadian Pictures', and closer to home, 'Australian Pictures'. The artist digitally combines these images with scanned patches that he has custom ordered.

With rare exception, the landscape backdrops in Second Empire are not only digitally inverted to become negative images, but also rotated such that the landscapes appear upside down. Hipkins says: "With this device, I am interested in the imagining of landscapes literally 'from the other side of the world'. Common to this series, as with its precedent Empire (2007), is the disruption of pictorial space with a centrally positioned and digitally scanned embroidered patch. With these elements, I am particularly compelled by the formation of a hybridity and the tension between the patches and backdrops in the building of narrative."

Over the last decade Hipkins has established an impressive exhibition and publication record in New Zealand. He has also developed an international profile, largely through his inclusion in major offshore shows and representation in international events and art fairs. They include: ShContemporary08, Shanghai, 2008 (Hipkins featured in a Starkwhite group exhibition); Tell Me A Story: Narrative Photography Now, San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts (2007); Picturing Eden, International Museum of Photography and Film, George Eastman House, Rochester (2006); The Village, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2006); A Molecular History of Everything, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2004); How Extraordinary That the World Exists, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland (2002); the 25th Sao Paulo Bienal (2002); Flight Patterns, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2000); and the 11th Biennale of Sydney (1988). Hipkins had a residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Programme (ISCP), New York in 2006 and was the artist in residence at The McCahon House in Auckland in 2007/08 where he developed the Second Empire series.

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