Mireille Astore

Apparitions
Aluminium mounted digital photographs:
Boy 3, Girl 1, Couple 1, Couple 2, Couple 3.

5 individual works, 120cm x 120 cm

U$ 2000 each for an edition of 10.

Memory and ritual are my concern in Apparitions: a series of photographs produced following a residency at the Broken Hill Regional Gallery in 2005.

The photographs are ocular conversations which set out to question what it means to be a child in an outback Australian town in the sixties, while at the same time mirroring childhoods lived elsewhere.

Upon encountering Broken Hill photographer Ralph O’Connor’s carefully preserved negatives of a 1963 “Holy Communion,” I found myself experiencing a daydream induced by the memory of looking into my own Lebanese family’s black and white Communion photographs. These inverted images became mediators between the memory of myself in a white robe in Beirut and the feeling of kinship with a community in an Australian town I knew very little about.

I was struck then by the universality of rituals and the bonds that take place through them. I felt as if history, immortalised through these carefully preserved images, was reinventing itself and offering me the chance to visit the present with a fresh outlook.

As if solarized, I digitally displaced the photographs of the children from their homely environment and onto the ochre landscape of outback Australia at dusk. In so doing, I transformed historical photographs into scenes of whispers, shadows and remembrances. The landscape photographed at twilight, seems also to accentuate the fragility of the children’s bodies. Spectre-like, they shimmer before our very eyes from within lush and mysterious settings. Although reminding me of the brevity of life, they are contaminated with the seductive power of an aesthetic that is both exquisite and uncompromising.

QUALIFICATIONS

2007 PhD (Contemporary Art — Scholarship funded) University of Western Sydney

2001 Master of Visual Arts (Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney)

EXHIBITIONS

Apparitions

— Solo exhibition — Photomedia Installation. Conny Dietzschold – Multiple Box, Sydney. 15 July — 16 August 2006.

— Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery. 5 July - 15 August 2005.

— Finalist in the William & Winnifred Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art,

25 August - 17 November 2006.

Efface: Death Becomes Her — Video — 8th Sharjah Biennial, UAE, 3 April – 4 June 2007.

3494 Houses + 1 Fence – Video-

CinemaEast Film Festival– New York, 8 – 15 November 2007.

In Focus – Tate (Modern) London, 10 April – 4 July 2007.

Adelaide Film Festival, Adelaide, 22 February – 4 March 2007.

Tone – Liverpool Regional Museum, 3 – 24 March 2007.

Nafas Beirut – Espace SD, Beirut, 12 October – 17 November 2006.

Exground Film Festival, Wiesbaden - Germany 17 - 26 November 2006.

Not From Here – Video – ://Self-Portrait, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Rosario/Argentina, 9 February - 2 March 2007.

Paranoia, Freud Museum, London, UK 11 January - 11 March 2007.

Konstföreningen Aura, Sweden, 28 April - 20 May 2007.

Ronmandos Gallery, Amsterdam, 14 July – 1 September 2006.

Casoria Contemporary Art Museum Naples/Italy, 16 December 2006- 16 January 2007.

Paranoia, Focal Point Gallery, Southend, UK, 4 November - 9 December 2006.

Paranoia, Leeds City Art Gallery, UK, 28 June - 27 August 2006.

Coding/Decoding, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, 1 September 1 – 29 October 2006.

An Ungrateful Death —- Mixed-media Installation — The Green Gallery, Female Orphan School, UWS, 21 July - 30 September 2006.

Tampa - Video –

Art in the Age of Terrorism. Millais Gallery - Southampton Institute, England 2005.

Groundworks - Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburg/USA, 2005.

Biennale of Video and New Media Santiago/Chile, 2005.

PRIZES, RESIDENCIES, AWARDS and COMMISSIONS

2007      8th Sharjah Biennial Commission

2006      Bundanon Art Residency

Finalist in the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize – Monash Gallery of Art

2004      Broken Hill Art Gallery Residency and Commission

Winner National Photographic Art Prize – Albury City Art Gallery

2003-2005      Finalist Conrad Jupiter Art Prize, Gold Coast City Art Gallery.

Contact

Mireille Astore is represented in Europe by ARTEGIRO www.artegiro.com.
For any queries, performances, expo and sales please contact artegiro@gmail.com

mireille@astore.id.au
http://mireille.astore.id.au

This artists is represented in Europe by ARTEGIRO, www.artegiro.com, email:
artegirofineart@gmail.com please contact Artegiro for any queries

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