The Making Badlands Exhibition

What do the badlands sound like? What do they look like? How do they feel? Where do they appear? In many ways, these are questions we have answered for us each and every day, whether we ask them or not. As the papers in the journal issue that accompanies this exhibition demonstrate, badlands are produced and reproduced daily across numerous media and spaces, in real landscapes, and in mental or virtual landscapes. Badlands suffuse the experience of everyday life here in Australia, and in many other places besides; they are experienced as urban industry and decay, as suburban sprawl, as racial conflict, as regional alienation and emptiness. This exhibition is an attempt to render the experience of the badlands across visual, aural and interactive media. The works in this exhibition constitute a series of forays into real and imaginary spaces and places. They are explorations in liminality, attempting to render visible and aural the spectral forms that line the collective unconscious. Some of the works are explorations of specific Australian sites – Juha Tolonen’s photographs of the Wittenoom Gorge and township’s decay in the wake of the mining industry present a stark and brutally real counterpart to this country’s past and present mineral boom-times. Likewise, Seth Keen’s video work utilizes 8mm home movie footage of a Bundaberg family, a missive from the heart of the burgeoning “lucky country”. Other works could be sited anywhere; Kay Orchison’s perfectly banal atopic spaces and Tim Thomas’s suburban McMansions are bleak heraldic visions from the catalogue of any industrialized nation. Other works are more concerned with imaginary spaces; Helen Ferry’s interactive animation and David Mackenzie’s video triptych depict spaces more psychical than physical. Regardless of approach, it is a concern with place that unites all the works in this exhibition. Badlands are places, they are places we go to, flee from, travel through, arrive at. And for Australia and Australians, badlands are liminal yet central; like any niggling emanation of the unconscious, like any secret that dare not speak its name, they must be known, acknowledged and understood.