“Thus”
Brett Jones
21 Sept → 13 Oct 2012

This exhibition investigates the reliability of signs in the ‘documentation’ of sculptural objects. The gap between a photograph of the object and the object itself is explored through the idea of ‘a copy without an original’. This notion of the copy is extended to the objects themselves that are castings of objects and thus already detached from their referents, displaced from their original signification. The photographic image is not the same as the ‘thing’; it is something very different materially, perceptually and semiotically. We have embraced ideas of simulacra and the understanding that the sign is not the thing, and we are often skeptical about the construction of photographic images in the digital age. So why do we take photographic documentation of art objects as representing those same objects? Why do we presume that the photograph somehow captures, that it is indexed to an object?

We think we know what something is, but we only know the idea of what it may be. This exhibition questions the presumptions of why we take the photograph as evidence of a pre-existent object. Instead proposing the photograph as something quite independent and unique from the object it seems to refer.

Brett Jones works with ideas around the copy and the original. Using various reproduction mediums including casting, photography, video and sound he is concerned with creating opportunities for displacing and unburdening the referent. He co-founded West Space in 1993 where he was centrally involved until 2008. He has exhibited in various non-profit spaces since 1991, received several government grants, generated and managed more than 20 projects including several international projects, published articles and presented papers at international conferences. He is currently undertaking a PhD at Monash University.