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.
George Criddle is an artist and writer from Naarm, Melbourne.
