Artists

Annette Kelm

Press release

Herald St is pleased to announce Domino, Annette Kelm’s third exhibition with the gallery and her first in its Museum St location. The presentation features eight photographs, including a new body of work produced on a recent sojourn in Ireland. Vibrant and uncanny, the images continue Kelm’s visual arrangements rooted in the implications and representation of objects in unlikely contexts.

Kelm’s photographs embrace a so-called ‘brutal’ tension. They are at once considered and aleatory, planned and spontaneous, and cohesive and chaotic. Using techniques stemming from commercial and documentary photography, the artist sets up her studio with backdrops, props, and framing devices to form scenes of chance encounters. In Fast Food, a brass horse found in an Irish antique shop stands atop an upturned Ikea shelf, plastered with bursts of jagged cardboard sourced from a craft store. The hot dogs, milkshakes, and French fries on the duvet cover forming the background dwarf the metal figurine, dousing its regal pose in a sea of kitsch. The image’s sunny palette is an aesthetic choice, but any search for symbolic resonance ultimately leads nowhere. Kreuzberg Target nods to earlier photographs from Kelm’s oeuvre, notably the series Friendly Tournament (2005) and Untitled (2006) which depict archery targets peppered with holes, as viewed from the front and back respectively. Much has been written about these works, placing them in a canonical lineage which includes the encaustic treatment of the same subject by Jasper Johns and the opening of the void in Lucio Fontana’s punctured canvases. In Kelm’s most recent revival of the concentric circle motif, the target paper remains unpenetrated, with an impossible blue rose rising into the spotlight of the central yellow bullseye.