Institute of Advanced Studies

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 global scale.

The Summer Exercises will be available for sale and signing at the end of the lecture.

Biographical details

Ross Gibson makes books, films and audio-visual installations, working in cultural institutions such as the Museum of Sydney where he was a senior consultant producer (1993 -1996) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) where he was Creative Director during its establishment phase (1999-2002). His latest book, The Summer Exercises (2008) is a collaboration between UWA Press and the Historic Houses Trust of NSW. Other books include: The Diminishing Paradise (1984); South of the West (1992); The Bond Store Tales (1996); Exchanges (1996) and Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002). His films and audio-visual installations include Camera Natura (1985),Wild (1993) and Street X-Rays (2004). His curated exhibitions include Crime Scene at the Justice and Police Museum, Sydney (1999, part of the ‘Life After Wartime’ suite created over the past decade with Kate Richards) and Remembrance + The Moving Image at ACMI (2003). He is currently Professor of Contemporary Arts at Sydney College of the Arts.