Artist’s Personal Collection

Firstdraft Gallery

24 April – 11 May 2013

Special Thanks to Chris Ross

Artist’s Personal Collection is an ongoing project that documents my personal collection of found photographs.  In 2007 I started collecting anonymous family photographs after discovering their existence in markets and second hand stores. I remain equally disturbed and fascinated by these intimate possessions being sold alongside manufactured collectibles and trinkets as cheap commodities. They exist for me as quasi-spiritual relics, physical embodiments of history, simultaneously portals of connection and decontextualised images of inaccessible memories.  The works on show are painted reproductions based on photographs sourced from Sydney and Singapore. They are hand rendered onto primed plate metal with water activated dry media, painted at the same size as the photograph. This process of replication is intended to both honour the original artefact and complicate normative understandings of ownership, authorship, authenticity, memory and history.

Photography by Zan Wimberley