Aqua/Bay #1

Merilyn Fairskye is senior lecturer in media arts and photomedia at Sydney College for the Arts. She has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, most recently in ‘States of mind’, Artspace, Sydney (2007) and ‘Interesting times: focus on contemporary art’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005) amongst many others. Fairskye has built her practice using installation, photomedia and video and works equally across these three.

For some years Fairskye has explored the nature of connection as temporal and geographic boundaries dissolve under the force of new technologies. The effects of corresponding changes in perception have found an almost sublime manifestation in the current series ‘Aqua’. ‘Aqua’ consists of two parts further divided into still and moving image. ‘Aqua/bay’ is located at Botany Bay where the wide channel to the ocean takes the eye past the bleak water, sky and coast line and out into the imaginary. The layering in this still image very effectively creates what the artist describes as ‘temporal depth’. Fairskye notes: ‘The formation of the images…closely resembles the sequenced exposures of chronophotography by …Marey which (like Bergson’s reflections on time) inspired the painterly experiments of the Futurists… The effect is to condense and dilate the experience of time, by superimposing a sequence of frames in 50 transparent layers.’ [Merilyn Fairskye ‘Aqua’, Stills Gallery 2007, exhibition brochure]