Stephen Haley
Lecturer
Visual Art History and Theory
Please click here to view images of Stephen's work.
Dr Stephen Haley came late to art having completed a BA in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne and then bumming about in a variety of unrelated jobs until 28 years of age. Since then he has completed a BFA (RMIT), a Postgraduate Diploma (VCA), a Maser of Fine Art (VCA) and a PhD (VCA/University of Melbourne). He has been a lecturer and tutor in Visual Art History and Theory, and has also lectured in the Painting Studio and in the Computer Lab at the VCA over the past seven years, having previously spent five years lecturing and coordinating subjects in painting studio and theory at Monash's Faculty of Art and Design. Stephen also has an extensive writing record, publishing a large number of critical essays, reviews and catalogue essays.
Working primarily with painting and now digital media, Haley has produced twelve solo exhibitions and participated in over eighty curated group exhibitions. He is represented in a number of collections and won several awards including the ANZ Visual Arts Fellowship Award in 2004 and the Deacon, Graham and James/Arts 21 Residency Award in 1998 that funded a four month studio in Tokyo. His recent work is concerned with Western space - both real and virtual - and how the real is increasingly supplanted and preceded by the virtual forms of the digital and the model. The iconography is often drawn from the localized landscape of the suburbs and the operations of the mirror. In 2006 Haley received the Australian Council for the Arts Overseas Studio Residency Award and spent three months in Los Angeles researching the city's many thematic spaces. In 2006 he also won The prestigious R M McGivern Acquisitive Prize for painting.
Dr Stephen Haley came late to art having completed a BA in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne and then bumming about in a variety of unrelated jobs until 28 years of age. Since then he has completed a BFA (RMIT), a Postgraduate Diploma (VCA), a Maser of Fine Art (VCA) and a PhD (VCA/University of Melbourne). He has been a lecturer and tutor in Visual Art History and Theory, and has also lectured in the Painting Studio and in the Computer Lab at the VCA over the past seven years, having previously spent five years lecturing and coordinating subjects in painting studio and theory at Monash's Faculty of Art and Design. Stephen also has an extensive writing record, publishing a large number of critical essays, reviews and catalogue essays.
Working primarily with painting and now digital media, Haley has produced twelve solo exhibitions and participated in over eighty curated group exhibitions. He is represented in a number of collections and won several awards including the ANZ Visual Arts Fellowship Award in 2004 and the Deacon, Graham and James/Arts 21 Residency Award in 1998 that funded a four month studio in Tokyo. His recent work is concerned with Western space - both real and virtual - and how the real is increasingly supplanted and preceded by the virtual forms of the digital and the model. The iconography is often drawn from the localized landscape of the suburbs and the operations of the mirror. In 2006 Haley received the Australian Council for the Arts Overseas Studio Residency Award and spent three months in Los Angeles researching the city's many thematic spaces. In 2006 he also won The prestigious R M McGivern Acquisitive Prize for painting.
Publications
This is a short catalogue essay written by Stephen Haley for Penelope Davis' exhibition Heavy Light, Nellie Castan Gallery, October 2003.
Transparent Things
These are striking images. Photographs of cameras shot without a camera, they hover translucent in a field of uncertain depth - liminal apparitions, neither solid nor slight. So beautiful are they, it is easy to forget how grotesque they actually are, these haunting ghosts of cameras-past materializing from out of the dark. Slow work this. Slow to produce and slow to contemplate - despite the initial effect on the eye - which is to stun it still, followed by a slow burn, like a camera flash and its retinal afterimage. Above all, these are visual works of rich and playful entrancement. They result from an intuitive and experimental process rather than a fixed project to illustrate a predetermined theme. In this way they are wondrous and speculative art, but the wonder they invoke also includes the conceptual speculations they spark and bring into focus. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel Transparent Things the narrator's observance of casual objects occasions a spiralling and dizzy regress along the chain of their being. A simple pencil for instance, recalls the myriad modes and stages of its production, from slow growing tree to final product. In a similar way, Davis' transparent things are portals to imagine all the processes of photography.
Photography is a medium of opposition and inversion. Light and dark, positive and negative. Light through a lens is flipped upside down, left to right, and is recorded as a dark shadow on the illuminated negative. The whole procedure is reversed and inverted when printing. Other binary relations and inversions abound. There is a direct and complimentary inverse ratio between shutter speed and aperture setting, between aperture setting and depth of field. A photograph records a presence and later represents this presence in the absence of the original. It makes past present. It freezes dynamic transience into static permeance. As much as it records the presence of light, a photograph also records light's absence as shadow. A medium of light, it metamorphoses in the absolute night of the darkroom.
Aspects of photography's oscillation between positive and negative is echoed in sculptural casting. In casting, an object is recorded by taking a negative mould of its exterior form and then investing the resulting absence with a material that will make a positive cast - the form is mirrored, but the substance altered. Like a photographic negative too, the cast allows multiple, serial production.
Davis's work plays within photography's field of oppositions and inversions. The work turns the camera back on itself using the analogous process of casting. Collecting abandoned cameras from op shops and rubbish piles, Davis moulds them in silicon. The moulds are then cast with transparent and tinted resins. Once set, the resulting casts are placed on photographic paper and exposed to light in a darkroom. Instead of producing a negative, the resulting photogram is a positive image recorded directly onto photographic paper. These proofs are then conventionally re-shot and enlarged to result in the final print. The complimentary processes of casting and photography are thus conjoined, but the result is very un-photo like. Light does not reflect from, but effloresces the cast, to be refracted and detoured as light will through a prism. Although the work sometime suggests digital manipulation, the process is entirely analogue - the otherworldly colours result from painstaking colour filtration adjustments made in the darkroom.
The resulting and various viewpoints - whole camera bodies, controls and knobs, oblique views, lenses, the interior hollows of the camera's dark heart made solid - are transmutations. The final luminous images float in aquatic suspension, strange animals drawn up from the depths. The rays of light passing through the resin seem to have been frozen within it, fossilized rays trapped in amber. The results can never be fully anticipated and the realism of photography here results in a uncertain abstraction.
Images of transparent beauty, the works are not only ravishing but evoke complex and poetic associations that subvert photographic conventions. Photography is a medium of light and time, one which usually operates at the razor-sharp fraction of a second, at "the Decisive Moment". In contrast these are long exposures and record not reflected light snap-frozen, but refracted light on its journey through transparency. Light here is not arrested at shutter blink speed, but seeps lugubriously through resin in slow time. Light becomes not fleeting but languid, not immaterial but palpable - heavy light.
Photography is also a medium whose practitioners often fetishize their own tools. They invest in devises known for their precision and accuracy, they delight in the steely sharp aesthetic of the machine. Conversely here, the hard tool has become soft and organic, the machine aesthetic has effused into a biomorphic mass embodying an alternative, contrary and misshapen beauty. The work jokes with the photographer's fascination with their equipment - removing it from the process while simultaneously making it a focus.
The camera, like the eye, cannot look directly at itself. In these images a missing self reflexivity is bequeathed to the camera - not through a literal mirror reflection, but through a glass, darkly. These are "cameraless" photographs, examples of the photogram, but the camera is not entirely banished. Instead, it has shifted its position from active agent to passive subject. The works are a form of self portraiture, not of the artist, but of the medium. Despite this metacritical stance, in these images, as in life, the camera looks back at us just as we look at it. How uncanny that the action of light through the cast lens should so resemble a human eye looking, unblinking, toward us. The camera's gaze and its mode of picturing the world is ubiquitous in the contemporary world. We are subject to the saturating effects of its logic. One of the outcomes has been to 'naturalize' photography - to assume that human vision is camera-like. In truth, the 'realism' of photography is a world away from human perception. The operation of the camera is slightly like the initial operation of the eye itself - lens, aperture, dark chamber, screen, receptors - but it is a woeful simplification of vision's complexity which truly commences with the conceptual operations of the brain. The camera, like all technologies, partially mimics aspects of the human body. We thus extend our abilities but substitute direct physical experience for a mediated one that takes another form. Having constructed this simplified mirror, however, there is a pervasive tendency for us to look into it and mistake the model for the real. That is, to imagine the camera as the model for human vision - indeed one more accurate or precise than human vision itself. It is said the camera never lies, it objectively presents the real, whereas in truth, the real reveals itself to us through the complex interaction of the eye and the brain. Perception is conceptual. It is not a dumb recording mechanism like the camera, no matter how comforting that notion might be. When these cameras anthropomorphically eye us back, they simultaneously acknowledge and critique this conflation of camera and vision.
These images combine an old technique, the photogram, with a unique process of production to create new possibilities in photography. They are informed by approaches drawn from a broad range of art practices - sculpture, industrial casting processes, minimalism, Japanese aesthetics, post-modern reflexivity and photography itself - yet they remain open to all manner of interpretations, many angles of view, many avenues of pleasure. The retina is an outgrowth of the brain. Pass your eye over these images, bathe in their suffuse, heavy light - immerse yourself in their liquid depths - and you will see.
Stephen Haley 2003
Transparent Things
These are striking images. Photographs of cameras shot without a camera, they hover translucent in a field of uncertain depth - liminal apparitions, neither solid nor slight. So beautiful are they, it is easy to forget how grotesque they actually are, these haunting ghosts of cameras-past materializing from out of the dark. Slow work this. Slow to produce and slow to contemplate - despite the initial effect on the eye - which is to stun it still, followed by a slow burn, like a camera flash and its retinal afterimage. Above all, these are visual works of rich and playful entrancement. They result from an intuitive and experimental process rather than a fixed project to illustrate a predetermined theme. In this way they are wondrous and speculative art, but the wonder they invoke also includes the conceptual speculations they spark and bring into focus. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel Transparent Things the narrator's observance of casual objects occasions a spiralling and dizzy regress along the chain of their being. A simple pencil for instance, recalls the myriad modes and stages of its production, from slow growing tree to final product. In a similar way, Davis' transparent things are portals to imagine all the processes of photography.
Photography is a medium of opposition and inversion. Light and dark, positive and negative. Light through a lens is flipped upside down, left to right, and is recorded as a dark shadow on the illuminated negative. The whole procedure is reversed and inverted when printing. Other binary relations and inversions abound. There is a direct and complimentary inverse ratio between shutter speed and aperture setting, between aperture setting and depth of field. A photograph records a presence and later represents this presence in the absence of the original. It makes past present. It freezes dynamic transience into static permeance. As much as it records the presence of light, a photograph also records light's absence as shadow. A medium of light, it metamorphoses in the absolute night of the darkroom.
Aspects of photography's oscillation between positive and negative is echoed in sculptural casting. In casting, an object is recorded by taking a negative mould of its exterior form and then investing the resulting absence with a material that will make a positive cast - the form is mirrored, but the substance altered. Like a photographic negative too, the cast allows multiple, serial production.
Davis's work plays within photography's field of oppositions and inversions. The work turns the camera back on itself using the analogous process of casting. Collecting abandoned cameras from op shops and rubbish piles, Davis moulds them in silicon. The moulds are then cast with transparent and tinted resins. Once set, the resulting casts are placed on photographic paper and exposed to light in a darkroom. Instead of producing a negative, the resulting photogram is a positive image recorded directly onto photographic paper. These proofs are then conventionally re-shot and enlarged to result in the final print. The complimentary processes of casting and photography are thus conjoined, but the result is very un-photo like. Light does not reflect from, but effloresces the cast, to be refracted and detoured as light will through a prism. Although the work sometime suggests digital manipulation, the process is entirely analogue - the otherworldly colours result from painstaking colour filtration adjustments made in the darkroom.
The resulting and various viewpoints - whole camera bodies, controls and knobs, oblique views, lenses, the interior hollows of the camera's dark heart made solid - are transmutations. The final luminous images float in aquatic suspension, strange animals drawn up from the depths. The rays of light passing through the resin seem to have been frozen within it, fossilized rays trapped in amber. The results can never be fully anticipated and the realism of photography here results in a uncertain abstraction.
Images of transparent beauty, the works are not only ravishing but evoke complex and poetic associations that subvert photographic conventions. Photography is a medium of light and time, one which usually operates at the razor-sharp fraction of a second, at "the Decisive Moment". In contrast these are long exposures and record not reflected light snap-frozen, but refracted light on its journey through transparency. Light here is not arrested at shutter blink speed, but seeps lugubriously through resin in slow time. Light becomes not fleeting but languid, not immaterial but palpable - heavy light.
Photography is also a medium whose practitioners often fetishize their own tools. They invest in devises known for their precision and accuracy, they delight in the steely sharp aesthetic of the machine. Conversely here, the hard tool has become soft and organic, the machine aesthetic has effused into a biomorphic mass embodying an alternative, contrary and misshapen beauty. The work jokes with the photographer's fascination with their equipment - removing it from the process while simultaneously making it a focus.
The camera, like the eye, cannot look directly at itself. In these images a missing self reflexivity is bequeathed to the camera - not through a literal mirror reflection, but through a glass, darkly. These are "cameraless" photographs, examples of the photogram, but the camera is not entirely banished. Instead, it has shifted its position from active agent to passive subject. The works are a form of self portraiture, not of the artist, but of the medium. Despite this metacritical stance, in these images, as in life, the camera looks back at us just as we look at it. How uncanny that the action of light through the cast lens should so resemble a human eye looking, unblinking, toward us. The camera's gaze and its mode of picturing the world is ubiquitous in the contemporary world. We are subject to the saturating effects of its logic. One of the outcomes has been to 'naturalize' photography - to assume that human vision is camera-like. In truth, the 'realism' of photography is a world away from human perception. The operation of the camera is slightly like the initial operation of the eye itself - lens, aperture, dark chamber, screen, receptors - but it is a woeful simplification of vision's complexity which truly commences with the conceptual operations of the brain. The camera, like all technologies, partially mimics aspects of the human body. We thus extend our abilities but substitute direct physical experience for a mediated one that takes another form. Having constructed this simplified mirror, however, there is a pervasive tendency for us to look into it and mistake the model for the real. That is, to imagine the camera as the model for human vision - indeed one more accurate or precise than human vision itself. It is said the camera never lies, it objectively presents the real, whereas in truth, the real reveals itself to us through the complex interaction of the eye and the brain. Perception is conceptual. It is not a dumb recording mechanism like the camera, no matter how comforting that notion might be. When these cameras anthropomorphically eye us back, they simultaneously acknowledge and critique this conflation of camera and vision.
These images combine an old technique, the photogram, with a unique process of production to create new possibilities in photography. They are informed by approaches drawn from a broad range of art practices - sculpture, industrial casting processes, minimalism, Japanese aesthetics, post-modern reflexivity and photography itself - yet they remain open to all manner of interpretations, many angles of view, many avenues of pleasure. The retina is an outgrowth of the brain. Pass your eye over these images, bathe in their suffuse, heavy light - immerse yourself in their liquid depths - and you will see.
Stephen Haley 2003
