Adrienne Martyn, Sam Norton: Things are, they do not happen

Curated by Jess Clifford

Things are, they do not happen presents the work of Adrienne Martyn and Sam Norton. Working from different generational perspectives, these artists engage with the inherited conventions of photography to both order and destabilise the representation of subjective experience. Exploring the tension between what is fixed and what extends beyond the frame, through their lenses, the portrait becomes a site of negotiation.

A practicing photographer for over fifty years, Adrienne Martyn began her career working in social documentary as part of the Sydney Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s, producing photographs for feminist periodicals including Broadsheet, Me Jane and Refractory Girl, among others. She became a member of the Sydney Women’s Film Group in 1972. Created in the year that British theorist Laura Mulvey published Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, her formative critique of cinema’s deference to the male gaze, Martyn’s film The Object (1975) articulates and subtly undoes the ways in which, as Mulvey argued, “Woman’s desire is subjected to her image  [...] as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Martyn’s studio portraits from the 1980s continue an inquiry into the politics of image-making: Who controls the image? Who determines how a subject is seen? Taken in close collaboration with her subjects, Martyn’s portraits are posed and poised—these are highly self-conscious acts of representation. In this exhibition, Martyn’s photographs are displayed behind sheets of clear acrylic, sheer surfaces intended to seduce and repel in equal measure.

In the series “As Long as Someone’s Watching” (2023–ongoing), Sam Norton’s archive of screenshots of Skype calls with her friends and family are enlarged and put on view. Initially taken as a form of memory device, these mirror-like images tread a line between public and private. In a haze of pixels and refracted blue light, they stage the shifting nature of communication in an era of surveillance, digital mediation and self-performance. Norton tests the contemporary interaction of spectatorship and validation, asking, does our existence depend on the gaze of another, or the way we see ourselves reflected back through screens?

Seen together, the works in Things are, they do not happen position portraiture as a kind of membrane or threshold that sits between external identity and internal experience. The artists consider what it means to be a person who is also an image, and recognise the mutually transformative capacity of this relationship. A performance occurs on both sides of the camera; in these works, “things are” and yet they also continue to happen. Norton and Martyn’s subjects exist in a state of active suspension, vibrating between being and becoming.

BTM Ahhh*
Sung Hwan Bobby Park
During Things are, they do not happen, a billboard-scale work by Sung Hwan Bobby Park occupies the gallery’s front window. BTM Ahhh (2023) depicts the artist wearing a bangtanmo, a ceramic military helmet secured with a satin ribbon, and bathed in hot golden light. Here the artist is both subject and agent, claiming the space in front of the camera as a site of representational self-sovereignty and intention. Sung Hwan works primarily in ceramics, and with reference to his experiences as a queer person undergoing military service in South Korea between 2012–2014. The BTM series, within which the ceramic helmet is centred, exists in direct response to the harm to Park and his peers forced to hide their identities by the armed forces. Sung Hwan has spoken about these helmets as expressions of fearlessness, and adornment as a form of self-protection. BTM Ahhh is self-portrait that shoulders inherited art histories, complex personal and political narrative, becoming a queer ancestor for the future. *Full title