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This exhibition places onto a stage a female protagonist, an actress playing a tragic role. She is poised, seated, staring serenely outward in a traditional studio portrait setting. She is obscured from recognition through the soft and reversed effects of a pinhole photographic negative.

My Tragedienne is our guide through a series of still images connected in a cinematic fashion. The actress inhabits mysterious staircases and passages held within ruins from far-off places, interiors filled with still-life arrangements. With her, we traverse landscapes paced by the chimes of a clock bell tower. The narrative is soaked in atmosphere, open and strange.

Claire Conroy’s mise en scène has been created with materials from her analogue photographic practice. The protagonist is not autobiographical but inspired by a collage made in 1924 by celebrated artist Hannah Hoch, titled The Tragedienne. This reference is a homage to avant-garde photography from Modernist art movements such as DaDa and Surrealism.

For this exhibition, Conroy presents new collages utilising materials created throughout twenty years of working in the darkroom. Also included are large-scale pinhole photographs made from bespoke cameras created by the artist. The images are meditations on a two-decade-long arts practice creating analogue images and experiments with the alchemy of the darkroom.

Philosopher Susan Sontag notes in her seminal text On Photography that the photograph has an inseparable relationship to history with ‘… its index of moments in time always referring to the past from the second they are taken.’ Conroy looks at how the medium, materials and technology of photography refer to history as much as the subject matter. This exhibition entertains ideas, and relationships photography has to memory, history and our ability to transform and distort the past through ‘re-collection’ or recollection of the past in the present.

Alongside the protagonist in My Tragedienne we travel through a narrative held in the suspense of imagination. My Tragedienne is an evocative exhibition exploring unique photographic images, using increasingly obscure image-making practices to explore the endless possibilities of this medium in contemporary art.

My Tragedienne                    $2, 000

silver gelatin pinhole photograph     114 x 77cm

2010

Still Life, Blossoms                    $790

collage with silver gelatin photographic paper and flocked paper     40 x 30cm

2023

Still Life, Durian, Banana, Persimmon                    $990

collage with silver gelatin photographic paper     58 x 50cm

2023

Still Life, Interior                    $790

collage with silver gelatin photographic paper and glitter vinyl     30 x 40cm

2023

Still Life, Mandarins                    $990

collage with silver gelatin photographic paper, flocked paper and glitter vinyl     58 x 50cm

2023

Still Life, Nasturtiums                    $790

collage with silver gelatin photographic paper and flocked paper     40 x 30cm

2023

Still Life, Starfruit, Custard Apple And Pineapple                    $990

collage with silver gelatin photographic paper, flocked paper and glitter vinyl     58 x 50cm

2023

Sumur Gumuling                    $720

silver gelatin photograph on fibre based paper     30 x 40cm

2007

The Witnesses                    $1, 800

silver gelatin pinhole photograph     1.2 x 1 metre

2015

Ha Ha Wall                     $1, 800

silver gelatin pinhole photograph     1.4 x 1 metre

2015

The Clock Bell Tower                    $1, 800

silver gelatin pinhole photograph     1.6 x 1 metre

2015

Still Wind In A Ghost Town                    $1, 500

silver gelatin pinhole photograph     50 x 110cm

2015

Lightspeed                    $2, 000

silver gelatin pinhole photograph    2.5 x 1 metre

2015

Figure                     $750

collage with silver gelatin photographic paper and flocked paper     76 x 101cm

2023