Echo and Abyss: Jacobus Capone
This suite of stills is taken from Echo & Abyss, an expansive 10 channel video work exploring the intricate nature of one’s unity with the ethereal in an age of increasing anxiety, denial and isolation. As a homage to poet Rainer Marie Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Jacobus Capone charts a journey starting in Sierre, Rilke’s resting place, and ending atop the Greenland ice sheet. The pitting of a solitary figure against the landscape is emblematic of Capone’s interest in and expressions of the fragilities of humanity and, conversely, the threat that humankind itself casts upon nature.
Rosemary Laing isn’t swayed by people from other places. She’s always sensed that her power resides where she lives. In the 1990s Laing, then one of Australia’s most promising young contemporary artists, received some well-meaning advice from an important English photography curator. She decided not to take it. This choice helped define her.
“I’d just made brownwork (1996–97) and greenwork (1995) and [the curator] told me that I should leave Australia,”
she recalls. “That whatever’s worthwhile in your work, you should really be [overseas] because that is where your future is.” Laing smiles. “He was very well-intentioned. But I remember feeling really angry. It made me more determined to grapple with what we are rather than what we’re not. It made me [realise] that this problem could be my subject, that I had to have the courage to blindly proceed in following through.”
We’re living through a moment whose problems demand solutions, an era where certainty is a form of social capital lobbed across the political divide from both directions. Laing’s work doesn’t live in the answers, only the questions. For the last three decades she’s given the problem of Australia a visual language. But the thrills of Laing’s images are as cerebral as they are optical. Her visions of brides that levitate in the sky and cars that combust in the outback, of chairs that turn up in the desert and carpets that blanket the forest, are feats .. Subscribe to read this article in full
