‘The last thing I remember …’ might suggest the recollections of someone emerging from a trauma, unconsciousness, or the fog of deep sleep. As a dramatic device, these words facilitate a drift into memory or dream, and encourage space and place to shift from present to past, or from reality to fantasy. They also articulate a moment of rupture in the narrative seam, allowing certainty to slip away and withholding the surety of cause and effect.

The three artists featured in The Last Thing I Remember… explored the rupture of narrative in the domestic sphere. Moving between interior and exterior, Jane Burton, Lily Hibberd and Brie Trennery rendered a sequence of oblique and unsettling psychodramas, employing theatrical and filmic modes of storytelling to suggest moments of tension and intrigue—illicit night encounters, domestic entanglements and menacing bedroom scenarios.

Together, these works can be seen as a series of narrative knots that withhold the cathartic release of the denouement, or final resolution. Partial and oppressive, deliberately circular and repetitive, they leave a tangled trail of possibilities. Their subjects are trapped in familiar environments in each instance made strange by desire, dream or anxiety. Events occur out of sight, or without easy explanation, and the air is heavy with the weight of expectation and anxiety.

Exhibition Catalogue:
The Last Thing I Remember ...

Image: ^{The Last Thing I Remember ..., installation view: Switchback Gallery, Switchback Gallery, Gippsland Centre for Art and Design, 2006}