Chantal Faust
Location: Tower Hamlets
I am interested in using photography to explore the relationship between touch and vision and how this distinction is gradually collapsing in response to evolving technologies. My images are made without a camera and yet they reference a pre-existing language of photography – how we read and understand images and the spatial relationships that can be expected when viewing a photograph. With the use of a flatbed scanner as an image-making machine, my pictures look towards a subversion of this photographic vernacular in order to create an uncanny viewing experience.
The scanner disobeys the rules of lens-based photography associated with aperture, depth of field and the use of perspective. Scanning requires an immediate proximity to the subject. It distorts and stretches space and yet the focus maintains an acute sensitivity to surface detail; so much so that the images can often appear hyperreal. The glass of the scanner makes a visible impact upon the surface of that which it scans. Any photographic anonymity offered from behind the camera's lens is here denied through the physical transformation of subject matter and the subsequent freezing of this pressured moment into a flat image.
contact: chantalfaust@hotmail.com
Exhibitions
SELECTED SOLO EXHBITIONS
- 2009 head land, Jenny Port Gallery, Richmond, Australia
- 2008 Pleasure Machines, Margaret Lawrence Gallery VCA, Southbank, Australia
- 2007 Through a scanner darkly, Jenny Port Gallery, Richmond, Australia
- 2006 Pear Shaped, West Space Inc., Melbourne, Australia
- 2006 Capture, KINGS Artist Run Initiative, Melbourne, Australia
- 2006 Monster, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Australia
- 2005 Pane in the glass, 24seven, Melbourne, Australia
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
- 2010 Autumn Masterpieces: Highlights from the Permanent Collection, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia
- 2010 Hypnopopia, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
- 2009 I Saw Myself In Your Eyes, Jugglers Art Space, Brisbane, Australia
- 2008 Scanned and Drawn (representing the Centre for Contemporary Photography), Melbourne Art Fair 2008, Royal Exhibition Buildings, Australia
- 2007 Perfect for every occasion: photography today (curated by Zara Stanhope), Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Australia
- 2007 ‘u-turn’, Glendale Art College Gallery, Glendale, Los Angeles, USA
