The Digital Gallery Exhibition: Every Public House On The Parramatta Line

Join us to view Ryszard Dabek’s digital exhibition, Every Public House On the Parramatta Line (EPH).

About the exhibition

Shot entirely on super 8 film, Every Public House On the Parramatta Line (EPH) is a fluid and impressionistic interpretation of the landscape directly adjacent to the train line that runs between Central and Parramatta, and Parramatta and Central. These two journeys are portrayed through a pair of discreet though interrelated films that simultaneously occupy the extended screen space of the gallery.

This project employs two distinct modes of visual representation: fleeting, hand-held footage shot from a moving train contrasted with more studied architectural footage that investigates a selection of pubs that can be spotted from the railway. These hotel buildings, largely remnants of the previous century, often stand in sharp historical and stylistic contrast to the surrounding built environment. It is intended that this sense of historical rupture is further promoted by the use of film-based media within the project. A sense of the uncanny pervades the project as the present is drawn through the appearances and poetics of the past.

Integral to this work is a soundtrack created for the project by musician/composer John Encarnacao. The soundtrack at once intensifies the imagery while lending a logic to the structure of the two screen spaces. It can be heard via wireless headphones provided in the exhibition space.

While these train journeys provide an easily apprehended and seemingly natural narrative structure to the work, this structure is invariably tested by the sense of psycho-geographic drift that pervades. Rather than providing closure by arriving at a final destination, EPH asks the viewer to contemplate the journey and its attendant architectural forms as a type of unresolvable evidence.

About the artist

Ryszard Dabek is a Sydney-based artist who works across photography and moving image. Following an extensive career as an educator and academic (most notably sixteen years as a tenured lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney), Dabek now operates as a free agent.

His work and projects have been exhibited in a wide range of international contexts and venues, including artist-run spaces, commercial galleries, institutional spaces and everything in between. In addition, Dabek has been an active participant in a number of key artist-run organisations, including First Draft and Loose Projects. His work is held by a number of collections, including Artbank and The Australia Council for the Arts.

Much of his recent work coalesces around the idea of a present haunted by the spectral vestiges of Modernity. Architectural form (utopian or otherwise), modernist design and cinematic reflexivity are all pivotal to this fascination with the recent past. Central to his practice is a critical and sustained engagement with pre-digital photographic and moving image forms and the ways these can interface with the contemporary digital moment.