This week we had a poorly attended meeting but it coincided with the Gallery starting to hang the anniversary exhibition.  Consequently, we had little to look at except for a video installation relating to East Berlin. 

​Bryony explained her plans for the upcoming anniversary and advised us that the Nolan Tapestry will be rehung. She also showed us some Nolan prints that will be on show.

We look forward to the anniversary celebrations. 
​
Neville Gibb

Members were excited to meet the curator of the Benalla Gallery’s new exhibition “Looking but not Seeing”.  Kiron Robinson is an art lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts who specialises in the art of photography.

He has selected twelve contemporary Australian photographers whose work illustrates the new directions in photography. Selfies, the internet and photographic software has revolutionised the way massive numbers of photographs are produced by all of us on our smart phones and uploaded to Facebook, Snapchat etc. Kiron emphasised that we can never see all that is being produced so why are we uploading our photos and who are they for?

Kiron argues that we are producing these images for ourselves rather than for others: the act of making photographs is the real point of our images – creating the world not reflecting it. 
 
Despite this, the twelve photographers he has selected share their images with us in this exhibition. They electronically print, scan, rephotograph, distort and manipulate their images using all the technology made available by programs like PhotoShop, ON1, Corel Paintshop Pro., Cyberlink Photodirector etc. These are photos like you have never seen before – they represent the individual ways the artists have seen and constructed their images.

If you have ever taken a selfie, uploaded your holiday snaps to  Facebook or wondered what on earth you are going to do with all these images sitting on your computer – then come along to the Benalla Gallery  and see some of the new possibilities of image making.

The group are to meet on Monday 8th October at 10am when Bryony will speak about the 50th Anniversary Exhibition - all works on display from the Gallery’s permanent collection, with a focus on those that were first acquired.  
​
Meg Dillon

Photographs: Margaret Walshe