Title
A long time between drinks
2005
printed 2009
Artist
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Details
- Dates
- 2005
printed 2009 - Media category
- Photograph
- Materials used
- portfolio of 13 offset prints
- Edition
- 2/20
- Dimensions
- 13 photographs: each 29.8 x 29.7 cm image; 33.3 x 32.9 cm sheet
- Signature & date
Signed and dated l.l. verso each photograph and l.c. title page, pencil "Simryn Gill 2009".
- Credit
- Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Collection Benefactors' Program 2011
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 173.2011.a-m
- Copyright
- © Simryn Gill
- Artist information
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Simryn Gill
Works in the collection
- Share
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About
Among Simryn Gill's multi-disciplinary explorations of identity and belonging, investigations of suburban locations carry a particular resonance due to their often autobiographical nature.
‘A long time between drinks’ 2009 is an intensely focused look at suburban Adelaide which was the artist’s first experience of Australia when she arrived in 1987 from Kuala Lumpur, and the city where she first exhibited. Gill returned to Adelaide in 2005 to revisit this early point of contact, producing an evocative series of 13 images.
The photographs impart an ostensible sense of alienation and isolation that corresponds to the artist’s position as an outsider looking in. Gill’s viewpoint of these empty streets that seem to lead nowhere is forensic and detached. But surprisingly, as repetitious compositions and details culminate across the photographs, the prosaic subject matter becomes increasingly surreal, abstract and even poetic.
As Sambrani Chaitanya has stated, ‘Gill's work is an investigation of the limits of categorisation,’1 and this group of works, just as in Gill’s examination of Marrickville (where she now lives) in ‘May’ 2006, emphasises the difficulty of defining an idea of place through mere description. Memory, time and pure invention are required to fill in the gaps. The eerie, yet evocative environment in these photographic prints is further enhanced by their presentation in a square box emulating those of sets of vinyl LP recordings.
1. Sambrani, C ‘Other realties, someone else's fictions: the tangled art of Simryn Gill’, [online], ‘Art and Australia’, v 42, no 2, Summer 2004, p 220
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Exhibition history
Shown in 2 exhibitions
Flatlands: photography and everyday space, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 13 Sep 2012–03 Feb 2013
Flatlands: photography & everyday space, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 Sep 2012–03 Feb 2013
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Bibliography
Referenced in 2 publications
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ARTAND Australia (Editor), Artist's choice: five decades of artists' writing, 'Writers' gallery 1998-2014', pg. 155-173, Australia, 2016, 168 (illus.), 179. illustration of k
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Brian Massumi, Here art grows on trees: Simryn Gill, 'Making To Place: In the Artist's Words, Refracted', pg. 185-236, Sydney, 2013, 184-185 (illus.), 187 (illus.), 278. illustrations of b and g
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