PUBLIC LECTURE: The Summer Exercises: making a town from photographs and silence

For fifteen years, Ross Gibson has been working with a remarkable archive of crime-scene photographs that are in the care of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW in Sydney. The photographs conjure a world that is simultaneously familiar and strange, a world where banality and enigma conspire to upset your commonsense understanding of urban life. The most recent artwork to come from Gibson’s work in the archive is the novel "The Summer Exercises". Gibson will discuss the philosophies and design procedures behind The Summer Exercises, giving a view into the way a narrative world slowly meshes with the 150 carefully chosen pictures that he has set aside to make the world that is witnessed in the novel. "The Summer Exercises" will be available for sale and signing at the end of the lecture.