Justin Spiers
BiographyJustin Spiers lives in Perth, Western Australia and Dunedin, New Zealand. He studied at the Dunedin School of Art, graduating with a Bachelor of Visual Arts. Exhibitions have
included The Detour, Fremantle Arts Centre (2010); Castleland, Blue Oyster Project Space, Dunedin (2011); Surface Tension, with Erin Coates, Red Gate Gallery Bei Gao, Beijing (2010); Greenwood Guardian, Guilford Lane Gallery, Melbourne (2009).
Group exhibitions include Pet Project, Australian Centre for Photography (2006); Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Prize, Gold Coast City Art Gallery (2011); Golden Lining, Platform Gallery, Beijing, as part of Photo Spring Caochangdi Festival (2010); National Photography Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2009, 2010); remix, Art Gallery of Western Australia (2011); Iris Award, Perth Centre for Photography (2010, 2011) and Wallace Art Award, Auckland (2011). Spiers has completed artist residencies in Beijing, Darwin, Sydney and Brisbane. A previous project Pet Photo Booth (with Yvonne Doherty) travelled widely and exhibited at the Bread Box Gallery, Perth
Artist Statement
People's encounters with animals are often mediated through a context of entertainment and leisure. Spiers is interested in the ways that these experiences are fabricated and why. His images explore our relationship to non-human animals and raise questions regarding our power over them. By considering obscure aspects within this framework we examine our relationship to - and increasingly our construction of - the natural world. In Zoo Series the camera offers a means of rendering more visible the glass barrier between the spaces of viewing and viewed. This mediating layer, which is meant to be clear and not seen, becomes a kind of third space, full of illusory reflections and a patina of scratches and marks. This series refutes the clarity and objectivity of the scientific eye, instead of a technologically aided observation of nature, the images present a dark and obscured view into the animal enclosures.
