“Two”
Vivian Cooper Smith and David Van Royen
29 Feb → 22 Mar 2008

Working independently, two artists present a single body of work inviting a rethink on how our identities are formed and how we form our identities. One artist reframes and recreates the childhood portrait with the grown adult present; juxtaposing two moments separated by three decades of experience. The second seeks to locate the private in the public and the real in the ideal. Reframing advertising imagery and removing commercial signifiers, appropriated portraits are repositioned as moments of intimacy and the personal. Presented together these photographs confuse and question our definitions of private and public, memory and fabrication, self and other.

Vivian Cooper Smith is New Zealand-born and spent his childhood in Bangladesh, India and Perth. He is now a Melbourne-based photographer and graphic designer.

David Van Royen is a Dutch-born, Perth-raised photographer who has for the last five years been exhibiting widely both nationally and internationally. He is based in Melbourne.