Head On: in association with Head On Photo Festival

Gallery 1 | I Was Too Late - David Wallin

'I found out my dad was dead when the police rang my doorbell one evening. We sat awkwardly around our half eaten dinner as the Sergeant shuffled through papers while wielding her large flashlight. Pointing out details; mumbling her apologies.

‍He’d finally succumbed to a lifetime of alcohol abuse and had died alone in his tiny housing commission flat in a city 10 hours away. I knew very little about my father’s life. We had only seen each other once in the previous 15 years and had been reconnecting through short handwritten letters in the months before he passed away.

My sisters and I entered his apartment with garbage bags and cleaning products. I came with the hope of finding some insight into his life, keepsakes from our estranged family; perhaps something I could take home to remember him by. Something to help fill in the 33 years of each other’s lives we had missed.'

Gallery 2 | The Window Seat by Peter Hendrie

'Photographs taken through the windows of commercial airlines on scheduled routes between 1982 and 2018.'

Gallery 3 | Sacrifice by William Debois

'A multi-year project Sacrifice that Debois has been working on since early 2020. In this time Sacrifice has documented sitters with black and white film in front of a backdrop custom made for the project, collecting the sitters' oral histories of sacrifice. Drawing its development founding from the classic road-trip format, a format undertaken by many influential photographers, Debois has captured portraits of people met along the way, by chance or through recommendation. In his travel Debois has met, listened to, and captured their visual and oral representations of sacrifice. A significant portion of the artworks were created during a road trip fromMelbourne, Victoria, to Gladstone, Queensland, covering 1,986.4kms from February toMarch 2021. In each town, and for each shoot, Debois set up a rugged-looking backdrop, fabricated from an old military tarpaulin, photographing his sitter using a classic Hasselblad film camera.'

Gallery 4 | Invisible Ink by Gabrielle Menenzes

'I want people to look beyond the women’s bodies and closer at the emotional truth of our desires. Women’s bodies through art have been objectified. There is of course a pushback on this, the male gaze combatted with the female gaze. But often we as women sexualize ourselves, or make ourselves one dimensional, hiding the reality of our desires. In her book “Three Women” that explores female desire, Lisa Taddeo writes, “We pretend to want things we don’t want so nobody can see us not getting what we need.” Pre tense is a default for so many women and I wanted to tell the stories that we don’t tell about the relationships that changed us the most: affairs, abortions, abuse, young love, old love, polyamorous relationships, and desire in its many forms.'