The work of artist, photographer and urban planner Damien Laing will be on display in Wyndham next month when his exhibition, ‘Second Nature’ opens at Dianella Community Centre in Tarneit West.
A member of the 16mm film collective Artist Film Workshop, Laing describes his work as reflecting his interest in the way things become normal.
His latest exhibition includes explorations of the anthropocene and is named after the philosophical concept of ‘second nature’ that appears and is modulated in the works of Hegel, Lukacs and Adorno. This concept asks what it means that the ‘human world’ nestles on top of nature, supplanting and veiling it. That no image on a wall truly exceeds comprehension, due to the ordering of perception that has been inculcated through education.
The exhibition of darkroom prints displays the adapted nature of the gardens and spaces of Wyndham and is witness to how the new becomes naturalised. It speculates if it is possible to puncture this second nature and yet rehearses its own defeat producing yet another image that represents and, in that representation, naturalises the unusual object of representation again. Allowing through the artful display, to be reunited with the normal. This is the process of reification in which attributes start to appear ‘as if’ they were natural.
Second Nature will run for two months from March 22 to May 22.
The exhibition will be open daily from 9am to 5pm and entry is free.
For more information: www.wyndham.vic.gov.au/whats-on/second-nature-damien-laing
