Envisioned: Rebecca Cummins and Rosemary Laing

About the exhibition
Bringing together new and recent works by Australian artists Rebecca Cummins and Rosemary Laing, Envisioned explored how the unseen or overlooked can be made visible through the use of both historical and contemporary visual technologies.

Laing presented eight C-type photographs from her 1996 brownwork series, comprising images of an international freight terminal at Sydney Airport. Captured from elevated and unfamiliar vantage points, these works focus on airfreight containers and cargo in transit. By revealing the labour, infrastructure and liminal zones that underpin air travel, Laing exposes the often-invisible processes that unfold between points of departure and destination.

In contrast, Cummins’s works drew on historical optical devices to offer new perspectives on the everyday. Installed outdoors across the university campus, five commonplace objects—a wheelie bin, a terracotta flowerpot, a birdhouse and a tennis racquet—were transformed into functioning camera obscuras, inverting the surrounding view. Inside the gallery, Liquid Scrutiny (Resurrected Dinner Party Devices), 1997, employed optical lenses to recreate paranoid tabletop surveillance instruments, referencing a seventeenth-century Czech camera obscura goblet.

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^{Image: Rosemary Laing, brownwork #16 1997 (detail), type C photograph, 122 x 244 cm}