READYMADE ROTHKO - BARTON TAYLOR

Captured on Eora Nation

Photography is a powerful medium able to flatten an idea or a moment, used in our architectural documentation work in an attempt to illustrate real space and form conceptually in two dimensions.

Taking a well trodden path and channeling my fondness for Jeffrey Smart, the Bechers, Aaron Siskind, et al., with my hoarding photos I play with what draws me to the new topographic movement, except brought to a point of radical flatness. As in colour field painting that the title alludes to, the idea of my creative ‘gesture’ is not so important, here I discover the gestures of others and recontextualize them.

Distilling some essence of the city into an image, each component, mark — built up organically like sediment on a river bank — has a narrative. The scars of a battle between cultural and financial development: as in the built environment a dance between ideas, commerce and bureaucracy. Behind the hoarding old marks are erased and new marks emerge. All at once this is just a temporary wall but so much more.