Stills on Campus - MAKEbelieve: Photographic Fictions

Sir Hermann Black Gallery, University of Sydney Union

Large scale colour photographs re-creating the Alice in Wonderland story, seemingly impossible photographs of engraved pollen grains, haunting details from 1920s spirit photographs and alarming mutant portraits are some of the works to be featured in the next exhibition at the University of Sydney Union's Sir Hermann Black Gallery.

MAKEbelieve: Photographic Fictions brings together the work of 10 contemporary Australian photo-artists in the third Stills on Campus exhibition, a series of collaborative exhibitions between The Sir Hermann Black Gallery and Stills Gallery.

In a world where the visual is dominant and the virtual is accepted, this exhibition looks at the way some contemporary Australian photoartists have sought to explore the unconscious, the imaginary and the inexplicable within our culture.

MAKEbelieve doesn't seek to present reality as we know it, but rather to set up or create an image which comments on our slippery and multi dimensional realities.

Also addressed is the notion of photography as a reliable index of the real. These photographers play on that quality, stretching it to the extreme.

Artists featured are: Pat Brassington, Christine Cornish, Shayne Higson, Martyn Jolly, Mark Kimber, Helen Kundicevic, Polixeni Papapetrou, Samuel Phelps, Robyn Stacey and Stephanie Valentin.

The exhibition complements the previous two in this series: Pinhole to Pixel held in 2001, an investigation of photographic techniques and RePresenting the Real held in 2002.