Strange Histories

Fairfield City Museum & Gallery

28 June – 6 September 2014

Curator Vaughan O’Conner & Sandra Di Palma

Special Thanks to Chris Ross

Strange Histories puts five contemporary artists in the midst of the Fairfield Museum & Gallery collection. Reflecting, mimicking and altering objects from the Museum’s varied social history collection, these contemporary interpretations trace distinctive local stories and explore diverse identities of Fairfield through its material history.

Jess Bradford replicates, in part, the slab hut within Fairfield City Museum’s collection of buildings. This collection of relocated and reconstructed buildings are presented in The Vintage Village of Fairfield as an on-site mock representation of a village containing historical buildings and businesses of Fairfield; a series of physical ‘snapshots in time’.  Graphite rubbings of the slab hut were made on rolls of rice paper, that mimic the wooden slabs, and placed on a partial structure that is a 1:1 representation of part of the slab hut’s frontage. Inside this structure is a painted replica of an archived photograph documenting the slab hut’s relocation to the museum from its original location, a document of the structure in parts, its roof removed and walls slowly being peeled away, visual notes for its eventual reconstruction, the historic photographic document resembling the fake slab hut within the exhibition space more so than the ‘real’ version outside within the fake village. Questions around real, fake or authentic are complicated with the replica, and its dialogue with the reconstruction, as Bradford’s work considers the complexity of memorialising, imaging and presenting this historical space/time, offering only impressions and copies of the ‘skin’ of the hut but not its insides.

Photography by Simon Hewson