Descrizione Opera / Biografia
Phillip George’s practice operates across zones of cultural difference; exploring and making connections between the complexities that exist between East and West. His work draws connections between Australian beach culture and the fractured, turbulent zones of the Middle East. George has exhibited widely over the past thirty years with exhibitions throughout Australia, Europe, America and Asia. In 2007 George received his Doctorate from The University of Western Sydney and in 2008 produced a seminal exhibition, Borderlands at the Casula Powerhouse in Sydney, NSW. His 30 Solo exhibitions include, Writing Landscape, Australian Centre for Photography Sydney, Borderlands, Islamic Museum of Australia, Melbourne, Photosynkyria 2001, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2001); Particles, Artspace, Sydney (1997 il Mondo Mongrel Mnemosinon Mantra, Artspace, Auckland (1995). Recent group exhibitions include CONECTIONS, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2012 Through the Roadblocks, Cyprus, 2010; The Resilient Landscape, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney (2007); Institute for Electronic Arts 10 Year Survey Show, BS1 Contemporary Art Centre, Beijing, China (2007); Un Australian, National Museum of Australia, Canberra (2006); NIGHT VISION, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (2004); Photographica Australis, international touring exhibition, Bangladesh Biennale, Dhaka & Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (2004). He is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, (1996) Burning the Interface Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney.
Places, like people, have biographies.
The work explores the biographical inscriptions onto the landscape, a palimpsest akin to the mapping of places, monuments and sites where commemorations are performed, enacted and where collective cultural geography is embedded and reinforced to form the construction of national identity both formally and informally. Conceptually the interrogation of landscape is viewed as a form of codified history, from the viewpoint of personal experience - a short historic time-frame, and from the formal public institutions a longer archaeological time-frame, seen as operating simultaneously. A core component of ‘of the wor poses questions relating to the inherent strength and sense of place that have existed within pre-modern societies and contemporary arguments of modernity’s shared identities and social cohesion. The specific selected sites are nationally and internationally located including, remote Australia sites and specific locations in Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon Palestine, Israel, Iran, Jordan and Oman. ‘Burning Worlds is saturated with the cultural politics of transformation, influenced both by the global and the local, placing the Australian landscape tradition into an international and national context. The sites are at once modern and pre-modern, mythological and archaeological; they are tribally, ethically, religiously and politically deeply inscribed. The paradox of place, complexities of histories and their interlaced narratives are played out conceptually from within the photographic works.
