THE LUNATIC

28 Mar – 14 Apr 2018

Opening Night | Thursday 29 Mar, 6pm–8pm

Henry Trumble

“The real question was not in the moons, but in himself.”

1Q84, Haruki Murakami.

The Lunatic (1) is a new body of work by Henry Trumble about the images we construct and carry within us that create our perception of the universe. The exhibition presents a series of photographic objects, such as contact prints exposed by the light of the moon and the restaging of a chance encounter with a pool of planetary particles.

The project draws from the narrative of Haruki Murakami’s dystopian novel 1Q84, whose protagonists find themselves in a parallel universe in which two moons hang in the sky and become an important placeholder for their own (new) reality.

Humankind’s desire to classify and label the world in an attempt understand it is explored in the works The Object and The Object (Demonstrated), where a strange black form is staged in a scientific experiment. The object in the images however remains mysterious (is this a meteorite?) leaving it to our imagination rather than rational examination to place it within our known world.

Astronomical images in the public realm enlighten our imagination and inform our perception of the universe. The Earthrise image, the first colour photograph of the Earth taken 50 years ago by the Apollo 8 crew while orbiting the Moon, profoundly changed the way we regard the Earth as an object in space and is attributed with sparking the environmental movement. Images such as this become part of our evolving collective encyclopaedia of understanding, and a reference point to navigate our personal landscape.

Henry Trumble, 2018.

(1) From Old French lunatique, meaning to temporarily have your sanity seized by the moon.

Henry Trumble (b. 1980) is an Australian artist and photographer living in Melbourne. In 2013, he completed a Photography Intensive at Columbia University in the City of New York and has since spent three years living and working in Berlin. Henry Trumble’s practice is based around new and traditional photographic processes and draws from an interest in the absurdities of the way we construct our world. 

Download The Lunatic exhibition catalogue HERE

IMAGE | Henry Trumble, The Object & The Object (demonstrated), framed darkroom prints | Courtesy the artist.