Here’s what we know

• George Criddle

Here’s what we know reflects on a series of road trips the artists, Rebecca McCauley and Aaron Claringbold, made in the outback. It’s an exhibition about driving, tourism, extraction, technology and more. McCauley and Claringbold have an excitingly responsive practice that is deeply engaged with photography. Their work successfully channels a love of taking and consuming photographs while drawing attention to the under-examined ideologies that form as a result.

Last year, the two joined up with artist Catherine Ryan to create a camera obscura inside the belly of a tourist ferry along the Birrarung Marr in a forty-minute durational work called Leisuretime (2022). In this work, site-seers are seated together to watch an upside-down projection of the city as seen from the ferry, which was accompanied by a guided tour. Images of people holding shopping bags are flipped upside down, and an exhausting list of shopping outlets in the city is announced as though these outlets constituted significant landmarks. The work was innovative and alienating, reframing our cultural precinct in terms of consumer obsession disguised as leisure. It literally turned everything on its head.

Narration is equally important in the exhibition. It uses the slideshow and collected images as a jumping-point for us to consider the mythological space of the outback: how contemporary tourism and its adventure seeking rituals might echo the legacies of earlier settler explorers; how bitumen roads uphold colonial myths via monuments that spring up like cold-sores along the sides of highways; and, of course, the role photography and photographic practice plays in perpetuating and/or challenging these stories.

Here’s what we know considers these topics in two parts. Walking into the gallery space, you see a couple of digital slide presentations playing from monitors mounted on car seat headrests held up by aluminium pipes of staggered heights corresponding to the height of each artist when standing. Every few seconds images on the two monitors change: a Toyota car advertisement is followed by the hyper-masculine slogan “You must be tough to survive”—all caps, metallic font. The other monitor shows a Google Maps image of, as we are told in the floor sheet, one of many colonial monuments plotted on the side of the road. Such images aren’t explained; they just flash back and forth between monitors every couple of seconds in no particular order, imitating the kind of distracted attention one has when a back-seat passenger on a road trip.

The second part of the show feels more like a postscript or travel report, helping to synthesise the chaotic collection of images in the previous work. In this room, we see a different series of photographs taken by the artists, likely on one of their trips across the outback. As you walk into the space, an analogue Kodak slide projector can be found sitting on top of a white plinth showing one of eighty images every twenty seconds or so. There is a sound component too: a harmonic soundscape by Bonnie Cummings and a text read out by one of two voices, presumably belonging to the artists, offering statements or observations often starting with the phrase “here’s what we know” (which recalls headlines from ABC reporters and could also be another way of saying “we don’t know everything”). These brief statements vary in content but address similar themes found in the images: maps, encounters with tourists, reflections on driving and the car industry, the colonial process of naming of towns, observations about the mining industry and how the circulation of images shapes our collective imaginary.

Statements like, “the frontier shifts, but the method stays the same,” helped me consider the practices of early settlers in relation to that of contemporary tourists and how trivial acts of getting lost have the potential to become mythic. At one stage, the artists recount their meeting with a couple of travellers in search of beaches. This story is soon followed by a description of an ill-prepared colonial explorer who died on his travels, later being memorialised by having his name on a street sign. These two instances together trivialise the heroic overtones of the latter, whose significance appears now to have been inflated with time.

The photographs, made into slides and projected onto the wall of the gallery, act as documents of their journey. Some of the images, those of quarries, or minerals, or mining machines, look like they might be from somewhere in Western Australia, others, of petrol stations, roads, shop fronts and coffee tables could have been taken somewhere in the outback, which according to one of the narrators “starts at the first roadhouse selling branded merchandise, anywhere more than half a day’s drive between Tesla superchargers, or anywhere that you can still find the lithium needed to make them work.” The absence of details about what is being photographed and where each image was taken gives the colonial construct of the outback a feeling of vague interchangeability. The presentation of this journey is not in-sync with the slides and has no starting point or destination; it is presented to us as circular or nonlinear. In contrast to this, reading the room sheet we learn that the works in this show were imaged and conceived across the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung, Whadjuk Nyoongar, Jinigudera, Yapurrarra, Pindjarup, Nyaki Nyaki, Kalarko, Ngadju, Kaalamaya, Wongatha, Mirniny, Wirangu, Barngarla, Kokatha, Arabana, Arrernte, and Neintangk peoples. The decision to steer clear of geographic details could be understood as a creative strategy for drawing attention to, but not perpetuating, the colonial logic of maps and place names. Do we take from this an assertion that a forced unknowing of the outback is preferable to its representation as a colonial mythic place?

Hillvale Gallery’s website states that it’s an artist run space, which was confusing as on my first visit many works were not switched on, and on my second visit the radio playing in the adjoining shop was so loud that it was difficult to hear the sound work. The Hillvale model is entrepreneurial; anyone can become a photographer by purchasing a disposable camera for twenty-five dollars via a vending machine outside the store, then return the exposed roll of film to the shop to be developed inside the lab—they also digitise the film so you can share the images with your contacts on Instagram. Is the artist-run gallery yet another stage of this creative process? This commercial context of photographic production and presentation at Hillvale Photo and the lack of care for the work in this instance formed the backdrop to McCauley and Claringbold’s exhibition. It frustrated me at first, but the longer I stayed and engaged with the work the more I began to see the potential of the show to operate as a circuit-breaker in an otherwise seamless loop of image creation, production, and circulation that was happening behind the gallery wall.