Thresholds

Exhibition dates: Thursday 21 January - Friday 19 February 2021

Thresholds presents recent collaborative work by Sydney-based artists Julia Davis and Lisa Jones. The exhibition, curated by Claire Taylor, explores ideas of transience and place. Thresholds invites visitors to reimagine layers of the built environment under Sydney’s CBD and contemplate the passing of time in both human and geological time-scales.

The main components of the exhibition are a series of large-scale drawings and photographs, and a multi-channel video installation. The immersive installation draws the viewer into an enveloping darkness from which details of tunnels and chambers beneath the city are glimpsed in torchlight.

The imagery reveals ethereal, liminal spaces that exist just beyond the brightly-lit, bustling, familiar city. Experientially, the installation gives visitors an opportunity to slow down, reflect and be immersed in a unique subterranean landscape where there is a very different sense of time. 

The installation and photographs reveal material histories of orphaned infrastructure sites. Once vital to the evolving city, successively repurposed and now abandoned, these sites appear in a state of suspended animation, as if waiting for the next phase of redevelopment. This is a layer of the city being actively reclaimed by the city’s remnant ecology, waterways and latent geology.

The large-scale drawings in the exhibition were created by submerging sheets of paper in the flooded chambers and then fixing the sediments that were deposited on them. They register the actions of the artists and capture the materiality of a particular time and place in the underground chambers: accretions of rock dust, city pollution, and traces of thousands of journeys in the particulate brake dust and dirt from the trains passing through adjacent live tunnels. 

This work was made with the support of The Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, Sydney Trains and GREYSPACE.

Photos by Maja Baska and Richard Glover ©2021