Christopher Day

Biography

Melbourne photographer, Christopher Day, puts a fresh turn on the tried and trusted documentary genre, but there is something else, something all his own. A sly absurdist intelligence is at work; a rye understated wit that can be described as irreverent (minus the religious overtones) and as defiantly of its place and time (which is to say Australian minus the nationalist overtones). In his recent work Day moves through still life to a style of photographic collage loosely borrowed from surrealism.

Solo exhibitions include, After The Breadcrumbs, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2009; A Little Boob, Victoria Park Gallery, Melbourne (2008); Big Trouble In Little China Heights, China Heights, Sydney (2008). Group exhibitions include SPBH, MiCamera, Italy (2011); South, MC Gallery, Sydney (2010); Wipe The Shit Off Your Shoes Before Entering, The Projects, Melbourne (2008); Neverness Part I, Right Angle Studios, Melbourne and Black & Blue Gallery, Sydney (2008); Everything Forever, Palm Court Gallery, Perth (2007); White & Black, Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne (2002).

For more information, visit Christopher Day's website here

Artist Statement

These photographs and collages bring together imagery from unexpected historical and contemporary sources, defying easy categorization to present a sardonic resistance to glib understandings of 'the end'. End presents a photographic deliberation of the word itself. The series is both literal and interpretive in the photographs of the body's end, or arses, and in the photo-collages gesture toward the more phantasmatic, apocalyptic end. Composites of photographic images, the photomontages draw physical and figurative correlations of the end in an approach that approximates filmmaking.

The project End was initiated in response to previous work, A Special Love. Photographs of people interacting with the daily 'Special' displays at the end of supermarket aisles were taken to create visual equations capturing the same situation as diversely as possible. The thematic repetition in the series, End, again represents the same situation with extreme diversity to carefully and tirelessly capture self-identical imagery to represent difference, where, at its most plastic experience, unexpected changes in the visual field vastly alter an image that seems to remain the same.