Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce You Are Here*, the first solo New York exhibition for Australian artist, Gary Carsley. Daguerreotypes were a seminal, large-scale photographic technique that utilized iodized copperplates and a camera obscura to produce photographic monotypes.They were a radically new medium when they were introduced in the first half of the 19thcentury. "Draguerreotypes" is a term Carsley uses to describe a series of digital images that are also outputted as photographic monoprints. Carsley begin... Read more

Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce You Are Here*, the first solo New York exhibition for Australian artist, Gary Carsley.

Daguerreotypes were a seminal, large-scale photographic technique that utilized iodized copperplates and a camera obscura to produce photographic monotypes.They were a radically new medium when they were introduced in the first half of the 19thcentury. “Draguerreotypes” is a term Carsley uses to describe a series of digital images that are also outputted as photographic monoprints. Carsley begins this body of work by taking photographs of important international parks (for this exhibition, focusing exclusively on Central Park). He proceeds to schematize these tonally, and from a vast archive of scanned adhesive laminated faux wood grain motifs, he elaborates a collaged image fragment by fragment. The results are images that look like highly complex pieces of intarsia, but which in reality exist only as digitalized faux copies of nature. As for parks, we proceed from the assumption that they are designed and curated representations of nature rather than nature itself, or as it can be called in this context, “dragged” nature.

The Central Park Draguerreotypes D.70 to D.76 were created for the exhibition You AreHere*. For this the artist has overlaid the gallery floor plan on top of a detail from a map of Central Park, so that, as one walks through the gallery, it’s space “morphs” into the familiar landscape of the corresponding section of Central Park. The map serves as the intersection between inside and outside, mashing the two into a series of established codes of scales, colors, and lines used in cartography, acknowledged as guides for getting you from one place to the other. The map will be available at the exhibition, and features an essay by Rafael von Uslar.

This past year Gary Carsley completed a major public commission for the Attorney General’s Department Building in Parramatta, Sydney. The artist exhibits regularly in Amsterdam and Cologne as well as Australia. Later this year he will participate in Intrude 366 Art & Life at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai.