Array #1, 2019, type C photograph, 92 x 230 cm.
ARC ONE is thrilled to present, Array, the final ‘cycle’ in award-winning Australian artist Murray Fredericks’ 16-year SALT Project. These visually arresting abstract landscapes continue the artist’s emotional engagement with Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre), South Australia.
“Stay there long enough, and the landscape forces you to a place beyond the rational mind, beyond your sense of self. It’s a part of the human condition we experience when confronted by concepts of infinity, absorbed in meditation, or when confronted by our own mortality. The images are responses to that experience”. - Murray Fredericks, 2019
Murray Fredericks has been drawn again and again to the extraordinary location of Lake Eyre in his pursuit to understand the overwhelming emptiness and powerful emotional resonance of remote land and sky. Camping alone for weeks at a time, Fredericks’ spiritual and mental experience of this environment is encapsulated in his immersive abstract landscapes that bear witness to the transcendent capacity of the natural world.
Array #15, 2019, digital pigment print on cotton rag, 120 x 160 cm.
Array is the final cycle in Murray Fredericks’ acclaimed SALT Project. In these new works the artist intersects endless space through the ethereal reflective quality of mirrors. Rather than employing the mirror as a symbol of self-reflection, Fredericks redirects our gaze away from ourselves and into the immense environment. His translations of the language of landscape verge on otherworldly; reflections hover together as geometric forms, apertures or portals, offering a dual experience of looking both into another realm and out, as the lake’s glass-like surface mirrors an infinite space above. In one moment, an ensemble of sky and surface meld into a symphony of stars under Fredericks’ powerful control. These works plunge the viewer into a mesmerising spatial gestalt as Fredericks dissolves the contours of the landscape into a limitless optical deception. Place is defined by boundless empty space, as his own reflections on landscape mediate and expand what we see. Offering the viewer an emotional engagement with the environment, we see evidence of greater forces at work. There is a sense of release as the self dissolves into the light and infinity. The residue is a signature of an artist who finds the deep layers of his work by revealing the inexhaustible depth of what is already there.
Murray Fredericks is an internationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning photographer and filmmaker. Fredericks has exhibited widely, including Fotográfica Bogotá, Museum of Photography, Bogota, Colombia, 2017; Inside the Dome (DYE2) (with Tom Schutzinger), Geelong Gallery, 2015-16; SALT, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, 2016; a major Australian landscape survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, 2012; and two solo shows at the Australian Centre for Photography, 2010 and 2015 respectively. His work has been acquired by prestigious public and private collections internationally, including the National Gallery of Victoria; Australian Parliament House; Australian National Portrait Gallery; Artbank; The Sir Elton John Collection; Macquarie Bank; Commonwealth Bank; The Myer Collection; The Valentino Collection; and a number of regional galleries across Australia. Fredericks has been the recipient of numerous awards and is a regular finalist in Australia’s top photography prizes. In 2015, he received the People’s Choice Award for the Bowness Photography Prize, was runner up in the Head-On Festival Landscape Prize and a finalist in the JUWS Photography Award. His first documentary film, Salt, for which he was cinematographer and co-director, won twelve major international awards, played over 50 festivals and was screened on the ABC and PBS in the USA.