Fairfield City Museum & Gallery

28 June – 6 September 2014

Curator: Vaughan O’Connor and Sandra Di Palma in partnership with Fairfield City Museum & Gallery

In Strange Histories artists Jess Bradford, Anney Bounpraseuth, David Capra, Sarah Goffman, and Sean Rafferty have been invited to engage with artefacts and buildings held within Fairfield Museum & Gallery’s social history collection. Bringing objects out from deep archives and taking contemporary interpretations of Fairfield’s material cultural heritage.

Jess Bradford replicates in part the slab hut within Fairfield City Museum’s collection of buildings. This collection of relocated, reconstructed, and fabricated buildings are presented in The Vintage Village of Fairfield, an on-site mock representation of a village containing historical buildings and businesses of Fairfield.  Pencil rubbings of the slab hut on rolls of rice paper are placed on a partial structure that is a 1:1 representation of the slab hut’s frontage. Inside this structure is a painted replica of a photograph documenting the slab hut’s relocation to the museum, a document of the structure in parts, it’s roof removed and walls slowly being peeled away, the historic photographic document resembling the fake slab hut within the exhibition space more so than the ‘real’ version outside within the fake village.