Murray Fredericks

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present our first solo exhibition by acclaimed Australian photographer and filmmaker Murray Fredericks, whose representation by our galleries was announced earlier this year. This presentation coincides with the artist’s career-spanning survey The salt lake – curated by the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) and currently on tour at Yarrila Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour – as well as his presence in this year’s Bowness Photography Prize exhibition at MAPh, where his shortlisted work, Dog Fence, Solitary Posts, is now on view.

Fredericks’s inaugural Michael Reid Sydney exhibition draws together key photographs from his seminal, decades-spanning Salt project alongside more recent images from his Blaze, Vanity and Dog Fence series. Connecting the visual and conceptual threads of his globally acclaimed practice, the exhibition traces Fredericks’s sustained inquiry into light, space and duration, and the psychological states that emerge through prolonged immersion in landscape.

Fredericks’s Bowness Prize work forms a centrepiece of his Eora/Sydney exhibition. “The Dog Fence is the longest continuous humanmade structure in the world,” says the artist, who traced approximately 1,500 kilometres of the fence through a simple methodology: a photograph made every 300 metres. “Conceived as a survey of place, the work instead became an investigation of the fence’s structures and their interaction with the landscape. Photographs gathered across the length of the fence were organised into typologies and layered through superimposition. The resulting palimpsestic images collapse multiple locations into shared forms, revealing a landscape shaped by repetition, intervention and control.”

Across a career spanning close to three decades, Fredericks has honed a singular photographic language shaped by prolonged immersion in environments at the far edges of elemental extremes. Grounded in reduction, seriality and sustained attention, Fredericks distils light, horizon and interventions on the land into images that move beyond landscape as scenery and towards the realm of minimalist, optically charged abstraction.

“Working on salt lakes allowed the landscape to be reduced to an almost blank field and the work moved away from topography towards perception itself,” says Fredericks, who has returned to Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre more than 30 times since 2003. “Light, tonality and scale became the primary elements. Landscape was no longer a subject to depict, but a space through which to explore duration, emptiness and the psychological states that emerge through immersion.”

For enquiries, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au.