Jack Ball Paint box mid-blue 2019 (detail). Photographic rag, 110 x 160 cm. © Jack Ball.
Jack Ball
Artist Showcase
Gallery 08
Until 16 January
Through photography and collage, this artist playfully explores themes of synthesis and queer identity.
Bringing together 10 years of Jack Ball’s practice, Wind Chill layers early photographs with new works continuing their process of undoing and re-making through collage.
The exhibition incorporates a selection of Ball’s works held in the State Art Collection, including photographs of handmade sculptural sets that are suggestive of bodies, landscape, and architecture. Placed in conversation with new work, Ball presents moments of everyday queer intimacy and images of their body in playful performances that navigate gender and self-assemblage.
Ball’s practice involves sifting through their extensive collection of images on hard drives, a massive stash that is difficult to navigate. Ball recalls “Folders buried in folders, folders with impossible time stamps, empty folders titled sensibly, but with the content removed… Every time I open an old drive I end up in a different place”. Rediscovered images are then printed, re-photographed and layered with new materials; a method that allows Ball to craft new narratives from past experiences.
As Ball states, “During this 10-year period, I started thinking about my skin, tissue, hormones, and body hair in the same way I approached paint, plaster, cardboard, and clay—as materials with histories, that are flexible and in process. The exhibition draws from queer, feminist and camp lineages to explore themes of collage, mess, excess, and amateurism within contemporary image-making practices.”
“There has been a cultural turn towards exploring trans representation through abstraction, as a way to question the common assumption that gender is only located on the surface of bodies. Whilst my images are not all abstractions, they play with the relationship between the inside and outside of bodies.” — Jack Ball, The View From Here 2021
